Just try dropping that word into conversation these days and see what kind of response you get. Chances are good the nickname will be met with a healthy dose of side-eye, a grimace or even a slap on the wrist.

]]>Frisco is the nickname we love to hate. How did this once widely-used name fall out of favor?Frisco is the nickname we love to hate. How did this once widely-used name fall out of favor?<br />
<br />
Reported by Vinnee Tong. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour and Ryan Levi. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran, Suzie Racho and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED10810:37There Were Once More Than 425 Shellmounds in the Bay Area. Where Did They Go?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/11/08/there-were-once-more-than-425-shellmounds-in-the-bay-area-where-did-they-go/
Thu, 08 Nov 2018 11:00:52 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11704679These mounds were used by Ohlone as burial sites for their ancestors, to help navigate bay waters and as a gathering place.ou may associate the Emeryville shoreline with shops, or the Scandinavian furniture store Ikea. But what you may not know is that before this place was a commercial mecca, there was a different man-made structure that towered above Bay Area residents: a shellmound.

Driving down Shellmound Street may tip you off, too. It did for Bay Curious listener Paul Gilbert, who used to live and work in Emeryville. He would cross Shellmound Street every day for years.

“And somewhere along the way I’d heard the story that there used to be a Native American mound of shells somewhere along the shore,” Gilbert said.

So he asked Bay Curious: “What’s the story behind Shellmound Street in Emeryville, and what happened to the Native American shellmounds that I heard it was named after?”

What are shellmounds?

Shellmounds are man-made mounds of earth and organic matter that were built up by humans over thousands of years. They were created by the people native to the San Francisco Bay Area.

The mounds served many purposes.

“Shellmounds are created by my ancestors as ceremonial places and as burial sites,” said Corrina Gould, spokeswoman for the Confederated Villages of Lisjan and co-director of Indian People Organizing for Change. Lisjan is one of more than 40 native groups that call the greater Bay Area their home. As colonizers and settlers came to Northern California, they lumped these distinct indigenous groups into one. These days this larger group is most often called Ohlone.

Gould said innumerable burials were found in shellmounds: “Children buried with their mothers who had been lost in childbirth. Elders with babies.”

These bodies were then covered with layers of soil, shell and rock.

Growing bigger over time, the shellmounds transformed the flatlands by the bay waters into an undulating, awe-inspiring scene.

The shellmounds also served as an active space for the living.

“People would come and they would trade with each other, and they would have ceremony at the top of these mounds,” Gould said.

Archaeologists have found remnants of communal fireplaces, workshops and homes on the mounds. They were so central to community life that it seems there wasn’t even time for topsoil to build up or for grasses to grow, said UC Berkeley anthropology professor Kent Lightfoot.

Their height, sometimes taller than 30 feet, served as a focal point to navigate across the bay waters, or to communicate with other tribes.

“You could send signals to other people across the bay because you could see their fires,” Gould said, which could, among other things, warn groups about toxic red tide.

“There’s all of these things that are in these mounds that tell us this rich history of our people for thousands and thousands of years,” she said.

Gould is referring to remnants of daily Ohlone life, like the foods that sustained them: not only the mussel, clam and oyster shells that give the mounds their name, but traces of salmon and sturgeon, deer, and acorns from the ample oak trees.

How many shellmounds were in the Bay Area?

The San Francisco Bay Area was a popular place to live for Native Americans. Natural resources from both water and land were abundant here. The area from Point Sur in the south to the Carquinez Strait in the north was one of the most densely populated places for indigenous people north of Mexico, with roughly 10,000 inhabitants.

All these people meant a lot of villages, and therefore a lot of shellmounds.

Native people began to disappear from their traditional land. When their houses of willow branches and tule reeds decomposed, the shellmounds were all that was left to mark where their villages once stood.

In 1909, a UC Berkeley archeologist named Nels Nelson counted 425 shellmounds around the Bay Area. He thought there had been many more, too, that were already worn away by water, time and development.

Corrina Gould believes that of the shellmounds Nelson documented in 1909, roughly four can still be seen, in such places as San Bruno, Fremont and Richmond.

What happened to the shellmounds?

Let’s take a look at the Emeryville Shellmound as an example of a larger trend. This shellmound was the biggest one recorded in the Bay Area, more than three stories high and 350 feet in diameter, Gould said. That’s larger than a football field.

But if you look for the shellmound today, you won’t find much above ground.

In the late 1800s, developers lobbed off the top of the shellmound to create a dance pavilion. At its base, they constructed an amusement park. Decades later the shellmound was leveled completely to make way for a paint factory. And in the early 2000s, this once-thriving native village became a thriving outdoor shopping center.

Flattening shellmounds like this happened across the Bay Area.

But Gould emphasized that the shellmounds are still here, albeit underground.

“It’s important for us to preserve and protect what’s left,” Gould said. “Even if you as human beings can’t see it on top, we know that the layers of our shellmounds go way deep underneath the land.”

The soil where shellmounds once rose is distinct. It’s a dark, rich color from organic material, with white pockets colored by remains of shells. It is still possible to find human remains underground, too. During the construction of the Emeryville shops in the early 2000s, construction crews and archaeologists uncovered human bones.

Gould said the shellmounds are beneath landmarks that Bay Area residents pass by daily: under a Burger King in downtown Oakland, or Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco.

The rich soil from the above-ground parts of shellmounds was used to pave roads, fill in parts of the bay and fertilize gardens.

Many of the human remains, such as bones and artifacts, have ended up in museums.

UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology has more than 5,000 sets of human remains from the Bay Area. A “set” could represent the remains of one or multiple people, or even just an isolated component of a person, according to a spokesman for the museum.

Two years ago, Gould and other Ohlone people viewed the Hearst Museum’s collection of human remains.

“From the top of the ceiling to the floor there was all these trays with our ancestor remains up and down,” Gould said. “I’ll never forget that experience that this institution is holding these humans, and for what purpose? And how many is too many?”

“They were the ancestors, you know, my direct relations.” Gould choked up as she spoke, describing her reaction after the visit: “I lay down in bed for three days and couldn’t move. And it still hurts.”

What’s happening with shellmounds now?

Gould and other Native American activists are fighting to acquire land where the oldest Bay Area shellmound, nearly 5,000 years old, once stood: West Berkeley. The space is currently an asphalt parking lot at 1900 Fourth St., between the Fourth Street shopping corridor and the bay. It has been designated as a Berkeley landmark since 2000.

Gould hopes eventually the land will be overseen by Ohlone and other Native Americans. Her vision is a space with native plants, a circular dancing structure for Ohlone ceremonies, and a 40-foot-tall mound with a spiral path and information about the Ohlone.

Gould and others regularly hold intertribal prayers here. Over her decades as an activist, Gould said Ohlone events have grown stronger, and the crowds have grown larger.

She sees this as part of a larger Ohlone resurgence: being consulted by the Hearst Museum that houses bones of their relatives, reviving dance steps no one has followed in 100 years, and learning traditional languages — not spoken in generations — from tape recordings.

Her hope is to renew more Ohlone ways, just as she hopes to build a new mound on the site of an old one, once flattened.

]]>These mounds were used by Ohlone as burial sites for their ancestors, to help navigate bay waters and as a gathering place.These mounds were used by Ohlone as burial sites for their ancestors, to help navigate bay waters and as a gathering place. <br />
<br />
Reported by Laura Klivans. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED10611:51Why Is Part of Alameda Island in San Francisco?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/11/01/why-is-part-of-alameda-island-in-san-francisco/
Thu, 01 Nov 2018 10:00:12 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11702058The answer stretches back to 1820, when California was still a part of Spain.Bay Curious listener Lori Bodenhamer has noticed something odd whenever she pulls up a map of San Francisco online.

“My little shortcut to get to Google Maps is I just type in ‘SF Map,’ and then Google pops up,” Bodenhamer says. “And it outlines S.F. in red, and I noticed there were some bits of red in Alameda.”

And it’s not just Google Maps being wonky. Maps from the San Francisco Planning Department confirm that a piece of Alameda Island is inside San Francisco’s borders.

To understand how this is possible, we have to go back hundreds of years to when California was part of Spain.

The Peraltas

It starts in 1820 when the Spanish government gave Luís Maria Peralta a land grant of more than 40,000 acres in recognition of his 40 years of military service. Known as the Rancho San Antonio, it covered present-day San Leandro, Oakland, Alameda, Emeryville, Piedmont, Berkeley and Albany.

Basically, the Spanish government gave him the entire East Bay (even though Native Americans, including the Ohlone and Bay Miwok, had already been living there for centuries).

Peralta never actually lived on the Rancho, but he split the land among his four sons, who settled the land, built homes, raised cattle and fostered the growth of a thriving, Spanish-speaking community.

In 1848, California was ceded to the United States by Mexico, and in 1850, it became a state. For existing landowners like the Peraltas, this created several headaches.

U.S. squatters settled in California without respect to who had owned the land under Spanish and Mexican rule. Squatters were such a problem that Antonio Peralta, one of Luís’ sons, was shocked in 1851 to find two men actually interested in buying some of his land.

William Chipman and Gideon Aughinbaugh bought 160 acres from Antonio in 1851 for $14,000, and they would use the land to found the city of Alameda.

But Antonio still had problems.

The U.S. government made Spanish and Mexican landowners go to court to prove their claims, and it wasn’t until 1874 that Antonio finally received a patent from the government affirming his claim to his land, including the piece he had sold to Chipman and Aughinbaugh.

The Navy Pushes Alameda Into San Francisco

The story picks up in 1956 when the U.S. Navy makes an eminent domain claim of about 50 acres of submerged land underneath San Francisco Bay off the coast of Alameda. (The Navy would end up revising their request down to just shy of 40 acres.)

The Navy was looking to expand the Alameda Naval Air Station, which had opened just before the start of World War II and served as the launching site for the first major bombing raid of Japan after Pearl Harbor.

The Navy had regularly filled in parts of the bay to expand the air station, but when they did it this time, they crossed over the invisible line underneath the bay that separates Alameda from San Francisco.

Thanks to the Navy, there was now a tiny piece of San Francisco attached to Alameda Island.

But no one at the time seemed to care much about this border breach. What they did care about was who the federal government would have to pay for taking this piece of land. The state of California said it was the proper beneficiary, but two East Bay women saw it differently.

Carol Heche and Elinor Petersen claimed that the submerged land actually belonged to them, and therefore they deserved payment as the descendants of the founders of Alameda — William Chipman and Gideon Aughinbaugh. Petersen said she purchased the estate of Aughinbaugh’s daughter, Ella, and Heche was Chipman’s granddaughter.

“She was very proud of their heritage, and she was the historian of the family,” says George Gunn, curator of the Alameda Museum, about Heche. “She claimed that their property extended out into the bay.”

This was the women’s central argument. According to court records, the women traced their claim through their Alameda ancestors and back to the original Peralta land grant from the king of Spain in 1820, which was, according to them, “bounded on the southwest by the sea.”

“In Spanish laws, the lands bounded by the sea, are lands that extended to the deep navigable waters of the sea,” Petersen wrote in a court filing in January 1962.

This begs the question of what exactly the “deep navigable waters” included and how far out these women claimed ownership underneath San Francisco Bay.

“I don’t know how far out I own,” Petersen said in court in August 1962, according to a transcript. “It doesn’t really make any difference, because the Federal Government is protecting it for me, and I have a fine Government and I’m not worried.”

But she and Heche were certain that they owned the part of the bay the Navy had taken, and they believed fervently that their claim had been confirmed by the 1874 patent, as shown by this exchange between Petersen and Judge Alfonso Zirpoli at a pretrial hearing in December 1962:

ZIRPOLI: The only question involved is whether or not your land comes within this patent.
PETERSEN: It does.
ZIRPOLI: If it does, you are entitled to judgment in your favor.
PETERSEN: Absolutely does.
ZIRPOLI: If it doesn’t, you are not.
PETERSEN: It absolutely does.
ZIRPOLI: I think it is as simple as that.
PETERSEN: It does, absolutely, every bit of it.

But it actually didn’t.

While the Spanish land grant may have implied ownership out into the bay’s “deep navigable waters,” the 1874 patent explicitly described the southwest border as, “… along the Bay of San Francisco, at the line of ordinary high tide.”

Zirpoli ruled against the women and denied their request for a new trial. Petersen and Heche appealed the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled against them.

“A boundary line at ‘ordinary high water’ or ‘ordinary high tide’ cannot, by any process of interpretation, be located somewhere on or under the surface of the water a mile or more from the line of high tide or high water,” the appeals court wrote in its February 1964 decision.

A year later, the federal government cut the state of California a check for $13,619.55 for the submerged land it had claimed nearly a decade earlier. And Heche and Petersen walked away empty-handed.

Who You Gonna Call: San Francisco or Alameda?

After the Alameda Naval Air Station closed in 1997, the Navy began transferring the land to different entities. In 2014, the Department of Veterans Affairs agreed to take over 624 acres, including the border-crossing sliver.

“From the VA’s perspective, it really doesn’t matter if it’s Alameda or San Francisco County. It’s federal property,” says Larry Janes, who’s overseeing the development of a new VA hospital and national cemetery on the former naval base.

Neither San Francisco nor Alameda zone the geographic oddity—which spans about 30 acres—and the VA has promised never to develop that part of the land because it’s home to an endangered bird species, the California least tern.

There’s currently no regular public access to that part of the former base, but our Bay Curious question asker, Lori, couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if a crime was committed out there. Whose jurisdiction would it fall under?

“We actually have a contract with East Bay Regional Park District police,” Janes says. “And we have our own VA police as well, and we work with the Alameda police, so if we needed backup from Alameda, we could go to them as well.”

Janes says the VA is talking to the city of Alameda about putting in a recreational trail that would hug the coastline around the sliver, so sometime in the future, anyone could walk from Alameda right into San Francisco and stand on land that was disputed all the way back to the king of Spain.

]]>The answer stretches back to 1820, when California was still a part of Spain.The answer stretches back to 1820, when California was still a part of Spain.<br />
<br />
Reported by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice, or use the hashtag #BayCurious.KQED10511:56Ghost of a Legend: How a San Francisco Civil Rights Icon Was Made a Monsterhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/10/25/the-ghost-of-a-legend-how-a-san-francisco-civil-rights-icon-was-made-a-monster/
Thu, 25 Oct 2018 10:00:02 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11700225One of San Francisco's purported 'ghosts' has a remarkable real-life story often left out of San Francisco's history books.“What are the most haunted places in San Francisco?”

That’s the question that Bay Curious listener Kelsey Poole asked us a few weeks ago. Which is how I found myself standing with her on the steep streets of San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood as the sun went down — on the San Francisco Ghost Hunt.

A Tennessee transplant to the Bay Area, Poole is actually already a fan of going on ghost tours when she travels, as a way to learn the history of a city she’s visiting — plus “you get some spooky stories that keep you up at night,” she says. But she’d never done one in San Francisco. (Want to go on a ghost hunt with the Bay Curious team on Nov. 1? Details and tickets here!)

The Ghost Hunt tour is led by performer Christian Cagigal, who leads us through these streets in full 19th century dress, top hat and clacking cane. From tales of ghostly apparitions to aristocrats meeting grisly ends, every corner brings another ghoulish story from San Francisco history.

There’s one stop on this tour we discovered, however, that tells a real-life story bigger than any Halloween legend: at the corner of Octavia and Bush streets, the place known as Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park.

The ghost of Mary Ellen Pleasant — a 19th century entrepreneur who once lived in a now-vanished mansion nearby, and actually planted the eucalyptus trees above our heads — is said to still haunt this unlit corner. Her spirit is said to summon chills, frighten dogs and even throw eucalyptus nuts at passers-by. (For the record, we escaped unscathed that night.)

Pleasant, Cagigal tells us, was born into slavery in the South and came to San Francisco in the mid-1800s — defying white society’s constraints to not only amass great wealth, but to use her power to advance the cause of civil rights in the city.

Yet she was also described as a witch, a “voodoo queen” and even a murderer. What’s real here?

“Her life is so enshrouded in mystery because she was her own spin doctor,” says Sacramento writer and performer Susheel Bibbs, who has studied Pleasant’s story for decades. Pleasant wrote three autobiographies — but each one contradicts the other on basic facts, such as the year of her birth.

We do know that she was born in Georgia, and was raised in Nantucket, Massachusetts, “in indenture,” says Bibbs. There on the East Coast, the young Pleasant became a crucial figure in the civil rights fight, secretly teaming up with abolitionists and rescuing escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad.

Her double life actually including presenting as a white woman when she could.

“She was very used to being covert,” Bibbs says.

The death of her first husband left her rich, and she arrived in San Francisco in 1852 — still passing as white. She invested this sizable fortune in property by establishing boardinghouses and laundries: services that a town full of prospectors relied on.

In these spaces, she learned the private secrets of powerful men, and used them as another kind of currency, to rise in society. While wealthy white people of San Francisco knew her as the white boardinghouse proprietress, the city’s growing black community knew her real identity.

To them, she was known as “The Black City Hall,” who brought the Underground Railroad to the West and helped black people find employment. And almost a century before Rosa Parks, Pleasant challenged San Francisco’s segregated transit system in court, winning black people the right to ride the streetcars.

“My cause,” Pleasant wrote in one of her memoirs, “was the cause of freedom and equality for myself and for my people. And I’d rather be a corpse than a coward.”

After the Civil War, over a decade after she arrived in the city, Pleasant finally checked the box that said “Black” on the census of 1865. While this undoubtedly caused a stir, Pleasant continued to move in wealthy white circles.

But by the 1880s, the wild, mud-caked San Francisco that Mary Ellen Pleasant the capitalist had carved her way into had itself transformed into a “very much more overtly racist” city, says Bibbs.

Across the nation, emancipated slaves became a convenient scapegoat for the economy’s woes — and as a wealthy, older black woman, Pleasant now inspired suspicion, even fear. The press coined a racist nickname: “Mammy Pleasant.”

Whispers grew that she had some otherworldly hold over the wealthy white people she was close to — especially when Pleasant became entangled in the scandalous 1883 trial of Nevada Sen. William Sharon, accused of seducing and then abandoning a young woman.

“It was like the O.J. Simpson trial” in notoriety, says Bibbs.

Lawyers for Sharon claimed that Pleasant, as the young woman’s friend, had used dark forces to manipulate her into entrapping the senator. And rather than rejecting the rumors, she defied them — encouraged them. She carried a voodoo doll in court, claiming she would use it to bring about his death. Wild thing is, he soon did die during the trial.

Pleasant’s status as a “voodoo queen” grew, cementing her reputation as a quasi-mystical figure in San Francisco. To the public, voodoo meant blood magic and malevolent intent.

To Mary Ellen Pleasant, however, the real voodoo — vodoun, or vodun — was actually her religion from her ancestral homeland of Haiti, says Bibbs.

Scandal followed scandal. When her business partner, a Scotsman named Thomas Bell, was found dead in Pleasant’s mansion in 1899, his widow collaborated on a full-page smear piece in the San Francisco Chronicle with the headline “The Queen of the Voodoos.”

The press had used the language of the supernatural to describe her for years — but now, they made her into a flat-out monster, accusing her of witchcraft and heavily implying she murdered Bell.

It’s telling who gets a legend — and who gets a ghost story. Mary Ellen Pleasant was demonized in her own lifetime. Yet in a system so loaded against a black woman in the public eye, playing with rumor, as she did, was perhaps the only way to play the game — even if it was ultimately her undoing.

She died in 1904, in her 90s, and her obituary in the San Francisco Examiner was titled: “Mammy Pleasant Will Work Weird Spells No More.”

How we’re remembered depends on who’s telling your story. And with such varying accounts, “one could not tell who she was,” says Bibbs. “Was she the … mother of civil rights, or was she a murderess?”

Or as Christian Cagigal put it in closing on the San Francisco Ghost Hunt, under those eucalyptus trees she’s said to haunt: “When there’s three versions of your life story. We don’t know what to do with your life story…. And we forget your story.”

He keeps Mary Ellen Pleasant on his ghost hunt, he says, “so we might start to remember.”

]]>One of San Francisco's purported 'ghosts' has a remarkable real-life story often left out of San Francisco's history books.One of San Francisco's purported “ghosts,” has a remarkable real-life story often left out of San Francisco's history books. <br />
<br />
Reported by Carly Severn. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED10411:15The San Francisco Origins of Green Goddess Dressinghttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/10/18/the-san-francisco-origins-of-green-goddess-dressing/
Thu, 18 Oct 2018 10:00:15 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11698960California's iconic Green Goddess Dressing may be herbal and delicious — but its name has a not-so-savory history.Brent Silver is a self-described foodie who has lived in San Francisco for 15 years. Over the years, he’s heard people claim all sorts of different foods were invented here: fortune cookies, chicken tetrazzini, the California roll and cioppino to name a few.

He came to Bay Curious looking for some facts.

“I wanted to know which foods originated in San Francisco?” he says.

This is one question with many answers. So we’re starting a new series called “Golden State Plate,” to learn the true stories behind our iconic foods. We’re doing it in partnership with our friends at The California Report Magazine.

Silver didn’t come asking this question without a few foods in mind.

“I was watching one of those Food Network TV shows, and they were talking about green goddess dressing. It was like this vibrant green dressing that you would put on salad or chicken or meats of different kinds. What is green goddess dressing and is it from San Francisco?”

The Green Goddess Story

he Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco is historically notable in a number of ways, including as a place where a sitting president of the United States died. It’s also the birthplace of a famous California recipe: green goddess dressing.

You’ve likely seen the dressing on the shelves at the grocery store, but you may not know the story behind the condiment.

I met Roberts and Borrman at the palace’s Garden Court restaurant to try some of the famous dressing at its birthplace.

“Sitting here makes you feel sort of automatically connected to history,” says Borrman. “I think about all of the other people who have sat at these tables.”

Roberts agrees: “There’s a lot of history here… A lot of people have been through these doors.”

This hotel, back in its day, was a place where lots of well-known and wealthy people stayed, like opera star Luisa Tetrazzini. The hotel claims to have invented turkey tetrazzini, named after her.

Likewise, green goddess dressing was inspired by another star guest: George Arliss.

Arliss was the lead actor in the 1920s play, “The Green Goddess.” While he was staying at the Palace Hotel for a performance, Head Chef Phillip Roemer created the special dressing to be served on the starter salad — and the rest is history.

“It is a favorite,” Roberts says. “There was a point when someone thought they could change it and took it off the menu. It lasted for like a day.”

“We can’t ignore how there’s something really enchanting about the phrase ‘The Green Goddess,'” says Bormann, who loves the dressing so much, she served it at her wedding.

“If you wear a green dress to work, everybody’s calling you the green goddess,” Roberts laughs. “It’s just kind of a thing around here.”

The result is a tangy, bright green dressing that is a far cry from the original invented in this kitchen almost 100 years ago.

According to Roberts, the original recipe was heavy on the mayonnaise, and was served on a canned artichoke, considered a luxury in those days.

Today, the Palace Hotel has lightened the dressing with olive oil. And there are no canned vegetables in sight.

So what about the dressing’s namesake? What exactly was the green goddess?

This is where things get complicated.

After the play finished, two film versions of “The Green Goddess” were made. And in them, Arliss — a white British actor — starred as an Indian maharajah.

All of the other actors were white too. They faked horrendous Indian accents. The film portrayed some of them as savages running around in afros, waving swords.

And the green goddess? She was a made-up deity in a bad Hollywood version of a Hindu temple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hldKQSUpgg

It’s honestly kind of a blow to me.

I love this dressing. I grew up thinking of it as hippie salad dressing, seeing it in the health food store, throwing it on my salads with sunflower seeds and carrots.

But my family is Hindu, my dad is from India. And this racist movie from nearly 100 years ago is straight-up worse than Apu on the Simpsons.

Sometimes digging into California food history isn’t so savory.

But green goddess is a California classic because of the things that make it so Californian: the fresh herbs, an obsession with a Hollywood celebrity, and simply how good it is.

I’m still trying to work through the fact that something so seemingly innocent as salad dressing can carry baggage when my salad arrives: a big mountain of crab on a bed of shaved zucchini on one side of the plate, some greens on the other and a gravy boat full of electric green dressing.

It’s hard to deny: the dressing is really good, despite the problematic origins of its name.

Both Borrman and Roberts describe it is as being “so Californian.” And they’re right: the dressing is clean and bright. It’s herbaceous and tangy.

But you don’t need to spend $40 on a salad at the Palace Hotel to try Green Goddess Dressing. You can find it pretty much anywhere at any supermarket, or make it yourself:

The Palace Green Goddess Dressing:

2 bunches of Italian flat leaf parsley (finely chopped)

2 bunches fresh chervil (finely chopped)

5 bunches tarragon (finely chopped)

5 cups fresh spinach

1/2 bottle chopped capers

1/4 bottle Worcestershire sauce

1/2 cup chopped garlic

1/4 cup shopped shallots

1 tbsp. sugar

6 anchovies

3 cups tarragon vinegar

1/2 cup Dijon mustard

3 egg yolks

6 cups corn oil

Preparation:
Combine all ingredients (except oil) in a blender or in a container using an immersion blender. Blend on high until smooth. While blending, slowly drizzle oil into mixture. Keep drizzling until oil is gone, then season with salt and pepper to taste. This recipe is for a one gallon batch of dressing. Can be stored in refrigerator for up to 10 days.

]]>California's iconic Green Goddess Dressing may be herbal and delicious — but its name has a not-so-savory history.California's iconic Green Goddess Dressing may be herbal and delicious — but its name has a not-so-savory history.<br />
<br />
Reported by Sasha Khokha. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julia McEvoy, Ethan Lindsey, Erika Kelly, Julie Caine, David Weir, Amanda Font, Carly Severn and Katie McMurran. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED1039:04Should Californians Allow Rent Control to Expand? Proposition 10, Explainedhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/10/12/should-californians-allow-rent-control-to-expand-prop-10-explained/
Fri, 12 Oct 2018 10:00:11 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11695998Proposition 10 aims to overturn the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing act, which limits rent control throughout the state.This whole week, Bay Curious is exploring the 11 statewide propositions on the California ballot for a mini-series we’re calling “Bay Curious Prop Week.” Each day, we’re dropping episodes looking at what the propositions are and how they came to be on the ballot in the first place. If you want to learn more about what’s on your California ballot, check out KQED’s 2018 Voter Guide.

JESSICA PLACZEK: Prop 10 wants to overturn Costa-Hawkins. But what is Costa-Hawkins? To understand that, we need to go back to 1995. It was the year that Brad Pitt won sexiest man alive, Amazon sold its first book and one of my favorite Mariah Carey songs topped the charts…

“Fantasy” by Mariah Carey plays

PLACZEK: But we’re here to talk about housing.

PLACZEK: At the time, the state was recovering from a housing slump and construction of new housing had slowed down. That’s when two politicians decided to try to curb rent control. The politicians were Democratic Senator Jim Costa and Republican Assembly Member Phil Hawkins. Together they drafted the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.

MATT LEVIN: And it passed by one vote. That shapes rent control policy across California.

PLACZEK: This is Matt Levin, a data reporter for CalMatters and co-host of the housing podcast, “Gimme Shelter.”

PLACZEK: Now, Costa-Hawkins limits rent control in a few big ways. For example, it barred rent control on most single family homes and condos. So most of the suburbs can’t have rent control. It also barred rent control on new buildings. So if a building was constructed after the law took effect, that building cannot have rent control on it.

LEVIN: You can’t impose rent control on properties that were built after 1995.

PLACZEK: The thing is, before Costa-Hawkins was passed, about a dozen cities already had rent control laws. And some had their own cutoff dates that had been established earlier. Those dates were frozen by Costa-Hawkins. So in Oakland, the cutoff is in 1983. Berkeley in 1980. While in San Jose and San Francisco, nothing built after 1979 can have rent control.

LEVIN: And so anything new and nice looking in San Francisco is not going to have rent control on it.

PLACZEK: Another thing Costa-Hawkins changed: it eliminated vacancy control, which ties rent control to the apartment instead of the tenant. With Costa-Hawkins, we have vacancy decontrol, which means if a tenant moves out of a rent controlled apartment, landlords can raise the rent as high as they please.

LEVIN: I see old apartments all the time. They’re total pieces of crap, and they’re charging like a bazillion dollars, right? But once you get into that apartment, they’re limited in how much more they can raise it.

PLACZEK: Today, only 15 cities have rent control in California.

LEVIN: It’s really the bigger cities, so L.A., San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose…

PLACZEK: But because of Costa-Hawkins, many units in those cities are barred from having rent control.

PLACZEK: In California, more than one in five households pays over half its income on housing. People are looking for ways to ease housing costs and some are looking toward rent control. This actually won’t be the first attempt to overturn Costa-Hawkins. Earlier this year, a bill went before state legislators.

ASSEMBLYMAN DAVID CHIU: This bill required 4 votes to get out of this committee, at this time there are 3, so AB 1506 fails passage today.

PLACZEK: It didn’t get too far.

Audience boos

[2018-prop prop=10]

ALLEN-PRICE: Ok, so now that you understand Costa-Hawkins, we can talk about Prop 10, which would upend that legislation. Here to talk about it with me is Guy Marzorati of the KQED Politics and Government Desk. Hey, Guy.

GUY MARZORATI: Hey!

ALLEN-PRICE: So walk us through Prop 10, what are we voting on?

MARZORATI: I think it’s easy to look at this as a measure all about rent control. I think it’s largely about local control. This is taking something, rent control, that’s been dominated by state laws over the last couple of decades, and it would turn it over to individual cities and counties in California and say, “if Proposition 10 passes, what do you want to do about rent control? How would you like to govern the prices of rent within your city or within your county?”

ALLEN-PRICE: So what does the prop actually say?

MARZORATI: It’s repealing Costa-Hawkins and taking us back to the time before that law when cities could implement their own rent control laws on an individual basis. And so you had some places like San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland that already had rent control on the books before Costa-Hawkins. But you had the vast majority of California cities without any rent control laws.

ALLEN-PRICE: So if this passes and Costa-Hawkins is overturned, what does it actually mean? Like what happens the next day? Do we suddenly have rent control everywhere?

MARZORATI: No, you don’t. There would be some cities that had certain pieces of their rent control that were explicitly outlawed by Costa-Hawkins. If Costa-Hawkins goes away, they can have vacancy control once again. But for the vast majority of cities nothing would change the day after the election or once the elections are certified.

ALLEN-PRICE: So it’s not like we’re going to have a flood of rent control laws suddenly coming.

MARZORATI: Absolutely not. I think here in the Bay Area there’s really just been one city, Berkeley, that’s put forward a measure saying if Proposition 10 passes here’s exactly how we would change or how we would expand our rent control laws. They want to introduce rent control on a rolling basis for buildings. So as buildings hit their 20th birthday, they age into rent control. But for most cities they haven’t figured that out. And I think what you’re going to see is a lot of long public comment lines at local supervisor committees, city council committees, as cities possibly take rent control up after a possible post-Prop 10 future.

ALLEN-PRICE: And, in a nutshell, what would this mean for renters in California and what would this mean for landlords?

MARZORATI: So I think there’s limited actual research on what rent control does. And like every housing thing, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You have all of these other housing laws intersecting with it. I think broadly speaking, the research has shown that if you are a current renter, rent control helps you stay in your unit.

ALLEN-PRICE: If you have rent control.

MARZORATI: If you have rent control. And that’s particularly true if you’re a senior citizen and you may be on a fixed income. Rent control can help stabilize the amount that you’re paying out for rent and it can help you remain in a unit. On the flip side, the evidence shows that it is a disincentive to actually build housing. If a developer is limited in the amount that they can make off of a rental unit, well, maybe they’re not going to build rental units, maybe they’ll just build condominiums or apartments for sale. And as we know, California has a huge shortage of actual housing units. So that’s the fear. If you take away this incentive for development then we’re going to worsen our shortage of units.

ALLEN-PRICE: There have been a lot of rent control measures that have been on the ballots, on local ballots around the Bay Area, and I think predominantly those have not passed. Why is that and do you think that trend will hold for this statewide prop?

MARZORATI: Well I think the political reality is that landlords are well organized in the state. The Apartment Association has well funded campaigns. They’re very politically active. And so in the past you’ve seen some mixed success on local ballots in terms of rent control. Although there have also been recent rent control victories in Mountain View and other places.

MARZORATI: So it’s hard to say local measures haven’t done as well and predicate failure for this measure. I think there’s just a groundswell of energy around this idea of rent control because it’s really easy to sell, to just say “the rent is too darn high.”

ALLEN-PRICE: You can say damn, it’s a podcast.

MARZORATI: Too damn high! We need some kind of solution. All that said, the political reality is California is at an all time low of home-ownership rates. We know homeowners are usually more politically active, and renters by nature are more transient. So I think that’s a harder demographic to capture politically.

ALLEN-PRICE: So you mentioned who is supporting this prop. Who is against it?

MARZORATI: As you’d expect, developers are against it. They see this as a huge cut into their business. If local jurisdictions start to limit the amount that they can charge on rents, well then how are they going to finance these rental buildings? And maybe they’re just going to go and build market rate units and condos. Developers also fear that this would create a patchwork of different rules. I think one thing they like about Costa-Hawkins is that it’s a state mandate. It governs this huge market that they develop in. If all of a sudden every individual city has their own rent control laws, that can make business harder for them. So developers have been financially the biggest opponents of Prop 10.

ALLEN-PRICE: All right, well it’s going to be interesting to see how voters respond to this one.

MARZORATI: Yes, will be interesting to see.

ALLEN-PRICE: Guy Mazorati with the KQED Politics and Government Desk. Thank you.

MARZORATI: Thank you.

Theme music

ALLEN-PRICE: If you want to know more about the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, or Proposition 10, Guy will be taking your questions in a Facebook Live on Oct. 24. You can go ahead and RSVP ahead of time so you’ll get a handy reminder when it rolls around. Get all the details at BayCurious.org.

ALLEN-PRICE: This episode was produced by Jessica Placzek.

ALLEN-PRICE: That’s it for Bay Curious Prop Week! Thanks so much for listening along. We hope this has been helpful and that you’ve learned a lot — I know I have. If you want to dig deeper into any of these propositions, you should check out KQED’s Voter Guide at kqed.org/elections. Next week we’ll be back to our regular schedule — dropping a new episode every Thursday. Prop Week was produced by Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi, Jessica Placzek, Vinnee Tong, Devin Katayama, Erika Aguliar and me, Olivia Allen-Price. Special thanks to Julie Caine and Guy Marzorati for their support. Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at KQED.

]]>Proposition 10 aims to overturn the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing act, which limits rent control throughout the state.Proposition 10 aims to overturn the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing act, which limits rent control throughout the state.<br />
<br />
Produced by Jessica Placzek. Featuring KQED's Guy Marzorati. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED10210:55Voting on EMT Breaks, Children’s Hospitals and Dialysis Profits. Propositions 4, 8 and 11 Explainedhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/10/11/voting-on-emt-breaks-childrens-hospitals-and-dialysis-props-4-8-and-11-explained/
Thu, 11 Oct 2018 10:00:28 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11696844Wonky and easy to overlook, these health-related propositions could have a big impact on Californians and the rest of the country.This whole week, Bay Curious is exploring the 11 statewide propositions on the California ballot for a mini-series we’re calling “Bay Curious Prop Week.” Each day, we’re dropping episodes looking at what the propositions are and how they came to be on the ballot in the first place. If you want to learn more about what’s on your California ballot, check out KQED’s 2018 Voter Guide.

Below is a transcript of our episode on Propositions 4, 8 and 11 — the three health-related propositions on the November ballot.

OLIVIA ALLEN-PRICE: Hey guys! Here we are, day four of Bay Curious Prop Week. I’m Olivia Allen-Price. If you’re just tuning in, all week we’ve been breaking down the 11 statewide initiatives on this November’s ballot. Today, we’ll look at the three health-related props. They’re easy to overlook but could have a big impact on you or someone you love. Stick around.

Theme music

ALLEN-PRICE: All righty. Let’s dive in. The three props we’ll get to today are Proposition 11…

VOICE OVER: Should EMTs and paramedics be allowed to take off-duty breaks?

ALLEN-PRICE: Proposition 4…

VOICE OVER: Should California issue bonds to help with improvements at children’s hospitals?

ALLEN-PRICE: And Proposition 8…

VOICE OVER: Should the state cap how much profit dialysis clinics can make?

ALLEN-PRICE: First up on today’s tour is Prop 11. I headed to the newsroom and asked health reporter April Dembosky to let us know what it’s all about.

APRIL DEMBOSKY: Prop 11 asks voters to decide if EMTs and paramedics — the people who work on ambulances — should be allowed to take uninterrupted off-duty breaks. So when they take a rest break or go out on their lunch break, are they allowed to turn off their pagers and radios so they can get a true break.

[2018-prop prop=11]

ALLEN-PRICE: Now this is one of those props that is so specific and kind of in the weeds that it makes me think that there must be a story behind it.

DEMBOSKY: You are absolutely right. So here’s the status quo of how it works for ambulance drivers. They are on a 12-hour shift. You know, they’re responding to emergencies. Maybe they have a lull. They drive up to McDonald’s or Starbucks to take a break.

JASON BROLLINI: If I’m lucky, I can sit for 30 minutes and get a meal.

ALLEN-PRICE: This is Jason Brollini. He leads one of the main ambulance drivers unions.

BROLLINI: What a more common experience is, we order our food, and we’re interrupted at some point. Sometimes those interruptions are for true emergencies, but sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re non-emergency calls where there isn’t a life-threatening incident that needs to be mitigated.

DEMBOSKY: This is the way it’s been working in California for many, many years. But in 2016, there was a court case in California, and it was actually on behalf of security guards. Security guards also have to be on duty while they take breaks. And they said, “Hey, if I have to be on duty, I’m not actually on break.” And the Supreme Court agreed with them, said yep, when you look at California’s labor code, if you want to have a break, you have to actually be off duty. And so the ambulance industry looked at this and they thought, “Oh no, this is going to apply to us, too.” And so they said we don’t want to do that. We’re going to have this proposition instead to try to carve out a law that is specifically for paramedics and EMTs to just continue doing their job the way they always have.

ALLEN-PRICE: So this is really a preemptive proposition.

DEMBOSKY: Sort of because there were actually negotiations in the Legislature between ambulance companies and the unions who represent EMTs and paramedics. They tried to address this head on, and negotiations between those two parties broke down, and that’s why the ambulance industry then put Proposition 11 on the ballot.

ALLEN-PRICE: So ambulance drivers and workers, what’s their take on this?

DEMBOSKY: The ambulance staff, for the most part, says totally, we don’t want anybody getting hurt. If I’m on my lunch break and there’s a kid choking a couple blocks down the street…

BROLLINI: We are going to go to that call. 100 percent of the time.

DEMBOSKY: But at the same time, they’re saying we work these 12-hour shifts. Sometimes work is so busy that it’s six or seven hours before I get to take a lunch break.

BROLLINI: Starting to get dizzy and lightheaded because my blood sugar is low.

DEMBOSKY: Not only that, I just responded to this really stressful call, like, I could really use a few minutes to just decompress, get back to my baseline, eat some food. And so they want the workers to be at the top of their game.

ALLEN-PRICE: You know, why is the ambulance industry different from any other industry where people are entitled to a break? What makes them kind of unique here?

DEMBOSKY: Well it’s definitely the public safety issue, you know.

ALLEN-PRICE: While it is public safety, about 75 percent of California’s 911 calls are answered by private companies. Carol Meyer works for McCormick Ambulance Service.

CAROL MEYER: There is an individual who has a heart attack, and we can’t call that vehicle, we have to call the next vehicle that is available and not on a break. And minutes make a big difference when it’s life and death.

DEMBOSKY: Most ambulance companies have contracts with the counties where they work. You know, part of what they’re concerned about is that if you have one or two ambulances from your fleet that are just totally out of service, that could compromise how well and how quickly you can respond to those calls.

MEYER: Having those vehicles available so that if something happens they can be called is critical.

DEMBOSKY: So there’s a serious public safety issue, but it really does come down to money, and the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated costs could go up 25 percent in order to have just enough extra ambulances on the road to cover people. And so when you start looking at cutting into those profit margins, you have these companies deciding whether or not it’s worth it for them to continue providing this service.

ALLEN-PRICE: So in a nutshell, a yes vote on Prop 11 would mean you think EMTs and paramedics should stay on call during their breaks. A no vote means in your eyes, ambulance companies should follow the same labor laws as everybody else. Next up is Proposition 4, one of the four bonds on the ballot this year. Now a bond is basically an IOU. The state sells a piece of paper that says if you give us the money we need now, we promise to pay you back later with interest. It’s a quick way for governments to get cash for big projects, and it’s a pretty safe investment for the people buying the bonds, too. Health reporter Laura Klivans explains what this bond, Proposition 4, would do.

[2018-prop prop=4]

LAURA KLIVANS: So this proposition is about the state being able to sell $1.5 billion in bonds so that they can use that to fund infrastructure improvements for children’s hospitals.

ALLEN-PRICE: The money from this bond will be used for capital improvements — essentially fixing up hospital buildings. Right now, a lot of hospitals are in the process of making seismic updates. These are required by the state to make their buildings safer in the event of an earthquake.

KLIVANS: The majority of the money will go to private nonprofit children’s hospitals. About 70 percent of it will. And then a good portion of it, about 18 percent, goes to the UC children’s hospitals and then other hospitals will get some of it too. And those are hospitals that will have, like, a children’s wing or a specific children’s program.

ALLEN-PRICE: Laura talked to Ann-Louise Kuhns, the president of the California Children’s Hospital Association. She says for an example of where this money could go locally, look to Children’s Hospital Oakland.

ANN-LOUISE KUHNS: You know, they provide some of the most specialized care for some of the most medically fragile kids in the state.

KLIVANS: They have a sickle cell program, and it’s one of two in the state. And they see about 700 patients a year.

KUHNS: And most of those patients are covered by Medi-Cal.

KLIVANS: Which is a program for low-income families.

KUHNS: Just the operational costs of running that center… just to run it the hospital loses about $3.5 million every year because what they receive from Medi-Cal isn’t sufficient to cover their costs.

KLIVANS: And part of the space that they use for that program is using buildings and facilities that are over 100 years old.

KUHNS: So they need to make infrastructure improvements. They need to modernize their pediatric intensive care unit and as well as their neonatal intensive care unit.

KLIVANS: So that’s what this bond would do. It would upgrade, like, the sickle cell wing at Children’s Hospital Oakland.

ALLEN-PRICE: So this is not exactly like a new bond initiative. We’ve seen similar bonds in 2004 and 2008 for children’s hospitals. Why is this a thing that just keeps coming onto our ballot?

KLIVANS: Great question. I also was curious about that, so I asked the folks behind the proposition, and they think that, no, we’re going to meet seismic requirements and then it’s going to be a while before we need any kind of money for infrastructure again like this.

ALLEN-PRICE: Is anyone against this?

KLIVANS: I think people who would be against this are folks that realize that bonds come from somewhere. It’s not just free money. They need to be repaid. They need to be repaid with interest. And how is this money held accountable?

ALLEN-PRICE: You are a yes on Prop 4 if you think the state should use bonds to help to fund improvements at children’s hospitals. And you’re a no if you think they should find that money some other way.

Music

ALLEN-PRICE: All righty. Last up we arrive at Proposition 8. It’s about reimbursement payouts from dialysis clinics. If that sounds super wonky to you, it’s because it is. But if passed, it would be groundbreaking regulation in the health care industry. People across the country are watching this one. I dropped in on health editor Carrie Feibel to learn more about it.

[2018-prop prop=8]

CARRIE FEIBEL: Hi, Olivia.

ALLEN-PRICE: How’s it going?

FEIBEL: Well, thanks.

ALLEN-PRICE: Could you start by telling us what is dialysis and who uses it?

FEIBEL: So dialysis is basically a machine that replaces your kidney, and for people who have failing kidneys — and many of them are waiting for a kidney transplant that hopefully they’ll get but some of them don’t — but they can live many, many years getting dialysis. It just cleans their blood of all the toxins and other things that our kidneys are usually doing. But you need to get it three times a week, three-to-four hours each. Which means that there has to be dialysis clinics near where people live, and there’s almost 600 clinics across California. So it’s a big industry.

ALLEN-PRICE: And these are all private clinics for the most part? Or…

FEIBEL: There’s a few that are owned by county hospitals and such. But for the most part they’re private clinics owned by for-profit companies, and there’s been more scrutiny lately on, you know, what the dialysis industry is up to and how much profit they’re making and that’s what brings us to this proposition.

ALLEN-PRICE: All right, so let’s get to this Prop 8. What are voters being asked to weigh in on here?

FEIBEL: Well this is a big deal at least in health care because basically California, if this passes, would be able to cap the amount of revenue a dialysis clinic company could get per patient and that would therefore indirectly cap how much profit and overhead they could take out of that clinic.

ALLEN-PRICE: This wouldn’t directly tell dialysis clinics what they can charge patients. Instead it would tell them they can only take in 15 percent more money than they spend on patient treatment. If they go over that 15 percent cap…

FEIBEL: Then they would have to rebate whoever paid for the dialysis, maybe the patient but more likely their insurance company.

ALLEN-PRICE: So who’s on which side of the story? Who’s for and against?

FEIBEL: The main sponsor of this is a union that has been trying to unionize dialysis clinic workers for a long time, and their hope is that this revenue cap would force the companies to reinvest in the clinic — put it into higher wages or better training for the workers or more drugs and tubing and supplies for the machines, which ultimately, the hope is, that would make a safer, more stable experience getting dialysis.

ALLEN-PRICE: So this would, in effect, force these companies to reinvest more of the funds than perhaps they’re reinvesting now. At least that’s what the unions think.

FEIBEL: That’s what the unions think, and that’s the whole thrust of it. And the dialysis companies say no that’s not what’s going to happen. What you’re actually going to do is really get into our business sheets and force us to close clinics. So it’s really unclear what the business ripple effect will be of this. And I think that the dialysis industry across the country is definitely watching this. If this happens here, they are afraid of a domino effect in all the states that could sort of potentially impact their bottom lines.

ALLEN-PRICE: So it’s a pretty radical ballot initiative really.

FEIBEL: It’s an experiment, for sure, pushing a big lever on an industry that’s important to a lot of Californians health.

ALLEN-PRICE: A vote for Prop 8 says you think this experiment is worth trying to get dialysis clinics to invest more in patient care. A no vote says this is too risky and could actually hurt patients by forcing clinics to shut down. That’s 10 props down and one more to go for Prop week. Today’s show was produced by Ryan Levi. Tomorrow we take on Prop 10 and the topic of rent control. Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at KQED. I’m Olivia Allen-Price.

]]>Wonky and easy to overlook, these health-related propositions could have a big impact on Californians and the rest of the country.Wonky and easy to overlook, these health-related propositions could have a big impact on Californians and the rest of the country.<br />
<br />
Produced by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED10113:40Should California Expand Tax Breaks for Older Homeowners? Propositions 5, 1 and 2, Explainedhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/10/10/should-california-expand-tax-breaks-for-older-homeowners-proposition-5-1-and-2-explained/
Wed, 10 Oct 2018 10:00:06 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11696966Propositions 5 would expand the ability of older Californians to take advantage of property tax breaks put into place 40 years ago by Proposition 13.This whole week, Bay Curious is exploring the 11 statewide propositions on the California ballot for a mini-series we’re calling “Bay Curious Prop Week.” Each day, we’re dropping episodes looking at what the propositions are and how they came to be on the ballot in the first place. If you want to learn more about what’s on your California ballot, check out KQED’s 2018 Voter Guide.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our episode on Proposition 5, which would give homeowners over 55, and a few others, the ability to take their low property tax rates with them to a new house. It is essentially an extension of Proposition 13, which was put into place 40 years ago.

OLIVIA ALLEN-PRICE: I’m Olivia Allen-Price, and we’re on day three of Bay Curious Prop Week. Today, we’re digging in on Proposition 5.

SCOTT SHAFER: Proposition 5 would basically expand Prop 13.

ALLEN-PRICE: Prop 13 passed 40 years ago and gives property owners low, low property tax rates with only tiny increases. And now with the state — and especially the Bay Area — in the middle of a housing crisis, voters are being asked to double down on Prop 13.

SHAFER: Problem is, it doesn’t really increase the housing stock.

ALLEN-PRICE: Today, Erika Aguilar and the team at “The Bay” podcast will dig into the pros and cons of Prop 5. Stick around.

SHAFER: So let’s start at the beginning. First of all tell me your name and a little bit about yourself.

KENNETH WILKINS: Oh god.

SHAFER: Kenneth Wilkins is a longtime resident of North Oakland.

AGUILAR: Scott Shafer is senior editor of the California Politics and Government Desk at KQED.

WILKINS: It seems like everyone who purchased a house, they are refurbishing it.

SHAFER: He was walking me down the street.

WILKINS: This house was the Dickson’s here. And they were here when I came in 1976. And this one here, Mr. Armstrong — he helped us with some plumbing.

AGUILAR: So he’s been on the block for 40 some years. How much was that house when he first bought it?

SHAFER: Well, it was very funny. He pointed to a car, his car that was parked in front of the house. And he said…

WILKINS: Actually it cost less than this car.

SHAFER: Is that right?

WILKINS: This car cost $21,000 I think. And it was less than that.

SHAFER: It was like a Toyota. But it wasn’t a Tesla. It was like a beat up Toyota.

AGUILAR: Wow. So that’s just representative of what the housing market looked like back then.

SHAFER: It’s not something he could find in the cushions of his couch. He had to get a loan. But nonetheless you get a sense of how much it’s gone up. Those houses now sell for three quarters of a million or more.

WILKINS: I never dreamed that a house would be sold for over a million in this neighborhood.

SHAFER: But they do.

WILKINS: But they do.
[2018-prop prop=5]
AGUILAR: I want to get into Proposition 5, but before we do that, I feel like we have to talk about Proposition 13. So can you tell me the story of how Proposition 13 became a California law?

SHAFER: Yeah, you have to go back to the late-to-mid-1970s. Jerry Brown was governor.

NEWS CLIP: After two terms of Ronald Reagan’s conservatism, California voters, who elected Jerry Brown as governor last year, were expecting several changes in state policy.

SHAFER: The cost of everything was going up quickly because inflation was high, and back then, local governments could raise the property taxes whenever they wanted to. And so if they needed to pay for something, they raised property taxes a little bit, and so people’s tax bills were going up as the value of their homes went up.

NEWS CLIP: Inflation’s hit the standard of living particularly hard here and soaring property taxes have been a major factor.

SHAFER: People, especially seniors, on fixed incomes were having a hard time staying in their homes. And at the same time the state had a pretty big budget surplus. And so there was all this talk in Sacramento about, “Well gee, why don’t we give people a tax rebate?”

SHAFER: But that didn’t happen. So there was this frustration building.

HOWARD JARVIS: I am forming the American Tax Reduction Movement for the United States.

SHAFER: There were two guys, Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, who became the spokespeople for this tax revolution.

NEWS CLIP: And the purpose of this amendment is, number one, to reduce the amount of money that government takes in in taxes because we think the only way you can cut spending is to not give them the money in the first place.

AGUILAR: What was the reaction to it? How popular was it back then?

SHAFER: It was really popular.

NEWS CLIP: Proposition 13 caused what may be a record voter turnout.

SHAFER: I mean this was a really overwhelming passage. It probably got about 65 percent of the vote in 1978.

JARVIS: We have proven that here in California, that we the people, not the politicians, are still the boss.

REPORTER: A thunderous response from Howard Jarvis…

AGUILAR: Proposition 13 did a few things. First, it taxed homes based on their 1976 values. Then for anyone buying a house after that, Prop 13 set the property tax rate at just 1 percent of home sales price. And it can only be increased by a maximum of 2 percent each year until the house is sold again.

SHAFER: It has taken a lot of money away from schools. Those local property taxes are used to fund programs including education. I think when Prop 13 passed, California was near the top in per pupil spending. Now we’re more toward the bottom.

AGUILAR: Back to Ken. What does Proposition 13 mean for him? Like how does it affect him considering that there’s a lot of movement along his block?

SHAFER: Well, he’s clearly benefited from it.

SHAFER: And do you remember if you voted for it?

WILKINS: I think I did.

SHAFER: His tax bill is, I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s a lot less than somebody who lives next door and just bought the house and is paying taxes based on the market rate assessment.

AGUILAR: Can people move their low property tax rates around right now? Or does it just stick to the house or property that you own?

SHAFER: If you’re 55 years or older or severely disabled, you can buy a home of the same or less value and take that with you to another county… if that county has agreed to accept that lower value.

AGUILAR: So not all counties are in on this.

SHAFER: Not all counties. In fact, most counties are not, so just about 10 of the 58 counties in California have agreed to accept this lower tax rate.

AGUILAR: So what problem is Proposition 5 trying to solve?

SHAFER: If you talk to realtors or if you talk to seniors…

CLIP: California realtors have an important chance to protect California’s homeowners and extend much needed property tax protection to seniors.

SHAFER: They have these big homes that they’re rattling around in, and they really would like to downsize. The problem is they’ve got this great deal on their property tax because they’ve been there so long and so they know if they move and buy a market value home, their tax rate is going to go way up.

CLIP: It will remove an unfair move-in penalty or property tax spike that prevents many seniors from selling their single family home in order to downsize or move closer to their children.

SHAFER: The argument here is that they will sell their big house, move to a smaller house and free up their bigger house for young families that want a three- or four-bedroom place. The problem of course is can a young family afford to buy that house?

SHAFER: The California Association of Realtors — and their national association as well — have kicked in at least $7 million to collect the signatures to get it on the ballot and then presumably to spend some of that money to help get it passed. They have an interest in it. You know, if you sell a house you get a commission, so they like that.

EISENMANN: It’s when people stay put that we have a more stagnant market in general.

AGUILAR: OK. Who’s on the other side? Like who is against Proposition 5?

SHAFER: Local governments are opposed to it.

AGUILAR: Tenants rights groups?

SHAFER: Tenants groups. Yeah. I mean all these groups, including education advocates, they’re afraid that schools are going to get less money. David Chiu is an assemblyman from San Francisco. He is a big opponent of Prop 5. He thinks it’s a big tax giveaway to people who don’t really need it.

CHIU: Prop 5 is an enormous tax break for longtime wealthy property owners who get to pile on more tax breaks on top of what they already have. While renters and first-time home buyers continue to face higher home prices it does nothing to actually address the housing crisis, and it continues to exacerbate the income inequality that is unfortunately the story all over the state of California.

SHAFER: And the legislative analysts who analyzed this said it’s going to ultimately cost local governments about a billion dollars in lost revenue in the coming years if Prop 5 passes.

AGUILAR: Wow. So what does Ken think about Proposition 5? Does he think he’s going to vote for Proposition 5?

SHAFER: You know he’s really thinking about it. He’s not sure. He clearly would benefit himself. On the other hand, he’s not in a big hurry to sell his house and move. In fact, he said “I’d like to be here till I’m 99 years old.”

WILKINS: In our case, I don’t think we will sell the property. We’ll pass it on to our grandkids and the grandkids’ kids and so forth. My daughter said, “No don’t sell it. Don’t sell it. When we get old enough, we won’t be able to buy a house.” Which pretty much came true, right?

SHAFER: She was right. That said, I think he likes the idea of Prop 5, but also he’s very thoughtful.

WILKINS: I think it might affect the tax base for those other counties or cities.

SHAFER: You’re right. And what would that mean?

WILKINS: Actually it would be something, I mean, to really think about before you voted against it or for it.

ALLEN-PRICE: Now Prop 5 is not the only housing-related prop on the ballot. The one getting the most attention is about expanding rent control, Prop 10. We’ll have a whole episode about that one on Friday. But there are a couple of other housing props we want to flag for you. First, Prop 1.
[2018-prop prop=1]
VOICE OVER: Should the state issue $4 billion in bonds to fund the construction of affordable housing?

ALLEN-PRICE: Money from Prop 1 would be used to give out low-interest loans for multi-family housing projects. It would also be used to help veterans buy homes. This would give California more housing, but some people say the real barrier to building is bureaucratic red tape and this wouldn’t address that. The $4 billion bond would ultimately cost California taxpayers just short of $6 billion over the next 35 years. And then there’s Prop 2.
[2018-prop prop=2]
VOICE OVER: Should the state be allowed to use money intended for mental health services to pay for housing for homeless Californians?

ALLEN-PRICE: Back in 2004, voters passed Prop 63 which raised taxes on millionaires to fund mental health services. Lawmakers want to use some of that money to pay for housing for people with mental illness. But it’s not clear if they can legally do that. Prop 2 clears everything up. It would allow the state to issue $2 billion in bonds to fund housing projects for people who are homeless and have mental illness. And it would let those bonds be paid back using tax revenues from Prop 63. The so-called housing first method has worked to curb homelessness elsewhere, but putting this money toward housing would mean there would be less going toward treatment and other services.

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ALLEN-PRICE: I know we’ve thrown a lot at you today, so if you have more questions about any of this — especially Prop 5 — we’re having a Facebook Live where we can dig in even more. That’ll be on Wednesday, Oct. 17 at noon. You can RSVP ahead of time so you won’t miss it. Details at BayCurious.org. You can also check out KQED’s Voter Guide at kqed.org/elections.

ALLEN-PRICE: Tomorrow we’re talking about the props that could impact our health care in California — and potentially the entire country. Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at KQED. I’m Olivia Allen-Price.

]]>Propositions 5 would expand the ability of older Californians to take advantage of property tax breaks put into place 40 years ago by Proposition 13.Propositions 5 would expand the ability of older Californians to take advantage of property tax breaks put into place 40 years ago by Proposition 13.<br />
<br />
Produced by Jessica Placzek, Erika Aguliar, and Olivia Allen-Price. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED10013:08Voting on Daylight Saving Time, Animal Confinement and Water. Propositions 3, 7 and 12, Explainedhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/10/09/voting-on-daylight-saving-time-animal-confinement-and-water-propositions-3-7-and-12-explained/
Tue, 09 Oct 2018 10:00:48 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11697391Should California go full-time daylight saving time? Take animals out of cages? Pass a water bond? For Bay Curious Prop Week, we explore the three science-related propositions.This whole week, Bay Curious is exploring the 11 statewide propositions on the California ballot for a mini-series we’re calling “Bay Curious Prop Week.” Each day, we’re dropping episodes looking at what the propositions are and how they came to be on the ballot in the first place. If you want to learn more about what’s on your California ballot, check out KQED’s 2018 Voter Guide.

Below is a transcript of our episode on Propositions 7, 12 and 3 — the three science-related propositions on the November ballot.

OLIVIA ALLEN-PRICE: Twice a year most of us in the United States go through a sort of time warp. In March we go to bed on a Saturday night climbing under our covers for a relaxing slumber. But then the alarm goes off an hour early the next day. This time warp is daylight saving time, of course, and it’s one of the three science-related props Californians are voting on this year.

ALLEN-PRICE: I’m Olivia Allen-Price. It’s Bay Curious Prop Week. All week long, we’re taking you inside what’s behind some of the many propositions you’ll be voting on this November. Today we explore questions of daylight saving time and animal confinement. Plus a water bond. Stay with us.

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DANIELLE VENTON: Daylight saving time is this practice that we have of switching our clocks twice a year.

ALLEN-PRICE: To help us understand Proposition 7, I called my friend from a few desks down.

VENTON: I’m Danielle Venton. I’m one of the editors on the science desk here at KQED.

ALLEN-PRICE: Prop 7 could lead to the end of switching clocks in California. But before we get into how the prop works, let’s first understand how daylight saving time came to be a thing in the first place.

[2018-prop prop=7]

VENTON: It was an idea that has been kicked around for centuries. Benjamin Franklin, he calculated that the French could save some number of pounds of candles every year by switching their clocks. But the first country to institute it was Germany during the First World War. Then they brought it back for the Second World War and that was meant to save energy.

VENTON: It was voted on by California voters in 1949 to adopt the practice of daylight saving time. It was wartime and this belief that it would save energy and would help the war effort… it was a very popular notion.

ALLEN-PRICE: I’d always heard it had something to do with farms. Is that just a total myth? Is that not true?

VENTON: It seems to be largely a myth. I mean farmers are going to wake up when the sun gets up. Cows do not read clocks. You know, you bail your hay when it’s ready.

ALLEN-PRICE: Because Californians voted daylight saving time into practice in 1949, it’s up to us to vote it out… or, in the case of prop 7, vote to pass control onto the legislature.

VENTON: So if it passes, the state legislature will have the authority to vote on changing daylight saving time, and if they approve it by two thirds, and if the federal government allows, then California could maintain year round daylight saving time.

ALLEN-PRICE: So people can think of this as like step one in, at least, a three step process.

VENTON: Right. But it’s likely that if there is a lot of voter support for this then the legislature would follow the will of the people.

ALLEN-PRICE: How did this get on the ballot?

VENTON: So Assembly Member Kansen Chu…

KANSEN CHU: Kansen Chu. I’m a state assembly member representing District 25.

VENTON: From the South Bay heard about this issue from one of his constituents.

KANSEN CHU: I got this idea from my dentist. You know he was telling me there was a health impact.

MALE NEWS ANCHOR: New at Six. Potential daylight saving time dangers. Now that the sun sets later.

FEMALE NEWS ANCHOR: But the changing of the clocks can also disturb sleep. Something some experts blame for an increase in car crashes this time of year.

VENTON: There is consensus that it disrupts sleep schedules, that there’s a higher incidence of heart attacks and stroke.

ALLEN-PRICE: Supporters of Prop 7 say not only is daylight saving time hazardous for your health, but it doesn’t really save energy either. Studies have found that energy savings is pretty much a wash. On the other side of the coin you’ve got opponents of Prop 7 who say darker mornings could be dangerous for pedestrians.

VENTON: If we kept daylight saving time year round that would mean very dark mornings in the winter, some people worry that that puts children, in particular, at extra risk when they are traveling to school.

ALLEN-PRICE: Now California wouldn’t be the first place to try to ditch the clock switch. Arizona and Hawaii don’t do daylight saving time and neither do most countries in the world. Even if this prop does pass, things aren’t going to change overnight.

VENTON: Clocks would still change in November, of course, on November 2nd. And they would still change in the springtime. But the legislature would have the choice of keeping that change permanent.

ALLEN-PRICE: So potentially in a year, we would not be falling back?

VENTON: That’s right.

ALLEN-PRICE: Next we turn to proposition 12, the animal confinement prop. It was put on the ballot by the Humane Society of the United States. KQED Science reporter Lesley McClurg explains what it’s all about.

LESLEY MCCLURG: Californians are going to vote on whether or not animals should come out of cages, like, altogether. So it would take pigs, egg-laying hens and veal calves out of cages altogether, and it allocates a specific amount of space for each animal depending on which animal it is.

[2018-prop prop=12]

ALLEN-PRICE: Now there are some farms that are basically already doing this kind of farming, right?

VENTON: Yeah, exactly. I went to a small farm in Pescadero near the coast and a farmer there, her name is Dede Boies, showed me around the grounds. And she is really, really passionate about taking care of her animals in the most natural conditions that she can.

DEDE BOIES: So we pasture raise two different breeds of slow-growing chickens, and ducks, heritage turkeys and pigs. Right now we’re kind of looking at the set up we have, where all the animals get rotated.

MCCLURG: The animals are kept in a very large, very open space.

DEDE BOIES: This time of day, they’re pretty much in the shelter. But in the morning and evening they definitely spread out a lot more.

MCCLURG: And she’s just really against the idea of keeping animals confined in any way.

DEDE BOIES: The point for me is to raise animals in a way that they were intended to live.

ALLEN-PRICE: Dede Boies supports Prop 12 because she wants to see more animals raised without cages. If this prop feels vaguely familiar to you, there’s a reason why.

ALLEN-PRICE: Didn’t we already do this? I remember voting on this already.

MCCLURG: In some ways we did already. This was Proposition 2, back in 2008. It said that animals should have enough space to stand up, sit down, turn around and spread their limbs or wings. It didn’t allocate a specific amount of space, and industry basically argued that that was too vague, so they didn’t take the animals out of the cages, they just put fewer animals in the cages.

ALLEN-PRICE: So, is it fair to think of Prop 12 as kind of a redo of Prop 2? Only this time, like, with much more specific requirements?

MCCLURG: Yeah that’s right. And so it’s 43 square feet per calf. It’s 24 square feet per pig and each egg-laying hen will have to have a foot of space. I think what’s important about Proposition 12 is it not only includes animals in California and how they’re raised but also anything imported into California. So this will change the practices for producers all across the country.

ALLEN-PRICE: And as you might guess, not all those producers are thrilled about Proposition 12.

MCCLURG: I also talked to a guy named Ken Maschhoff. He’s a pork producer in Illinois.

KEN MASCHHOFF: We’re on the same land that my great great great great grandfather purchased in 1851.

MCCLURG: And he was really adamant that he believes in taking care of animals, but he actually specifically said the animals do not have rights.

KEN MASCHHOFF: But I believe that farmers, ranchers, veterinarians are animal welfarists. So there’s a difference between animal rights and animal welfare.

MCCLURG: And then we should take care of animals as best we can but we need to be cost effective.

KEN MASCHHOFF: [This] type of legislation actually affects low income people much much harder than middle or high income folks because they just can’t afford the cost of their food.

MCCLURG: And he says, you know, if consumers are willing to pay more these products are already available in the grocery store. You can already buy cage-free, organic, etc. products. Those are available. So why force everyone to do something that maybe they can’t afford?

ALLEN-PRICE: If Prop 12 passes there is some time built in for producers to adapt their facilities. Changes for pork and veal need to be done by 2020 and for egg-laying hens, it’s 2022.

ALLEN-PRICE: Last up, we’ve got Proposition 3. And what would a California election be without a water prop on the ballot? Voters just okayed a $4 billion water bond in June of this year. And here we are again.

[2018-prop prop=3]

FEMALE NEWS ANCHOR: A measure on the ballot this November could have major implications for our water here…

ALLEN-PRICE: If passed, Prop 3 would issue nearly $9 billion in bonds to fund a bunch of different water projects. The largest payouts go to projects that improve water quality, restore watersheds and help sustain our groundwater. There is some disagreement among environmentalists on this one. Supporters, like Save the Bay, say it will leave the state better prepared for a drought, and help fix our water infrastructure. But opponents, like the Sierra Club, say it benefits wealthy farmers in the Central Valley and taxpayers shouldn’t foot the bill for projects the private sector should cover. We’ve got more on Proposition 3 on the Bay Curious website. You’ll find a KQED Forum debate on the topic, plus a guide to all the propositions on the November ballot.

ALLEN-PRICE: This episode was produced by Ryan Levi, and me, Olivia Allen-Price. We’ll be back in your feed tomorrow morning for a look at Proposition 5, which could expand tax breaks for homeowners 55 and older. It’s a really interesting one. You definitely want to tune in. Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at KQED.

]]>Should California go full-time daylight saving time? Take animals out of cages? Pass a water bond? For Bay Curious Prop Week, we explore the three science-related propositions.Should California go full-time daylight saving time? Take animals out of cages? Pass a water bond? For Bay Curious Prop Week, we explore the three science-related propositions.<br />
<br />
For more from Prop Week, visit BayCurious.org or check out other episodes in our feed!<br />
<br />
Produced by Ryan Levi and Olivia Allen-Price. Featuring KQED's Danielle Venton and Lesley McClurg. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED9911:06What If Californians Repealed the Gas Tax? Proposition 6, Explainedhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/10/08/what-if-californians-repealed-the-gas-tax-prop-6-explained/
Mon, 08 Oct 2018 10:00:56 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11696663Bay Curious Prop Week: If Proposition 6 is approved, it would repeal SB 1, the gas tax and vehicle fee increase passed by state lawmakers last year.This whole week, Bay Curious is exploring the 11 statewide propositions on the California ballot for a mini-series we’re calling “Bay Curious Prop Week.” Each day, we’re dropping episodes looking at what the propositions are and how they came to be on the ballot in the first place.

OLIVIA ALLEN-PRICE: I’m Olivia Allen-Price. This is Bay Curious. Election season is here, and if you’re anything like me, you wait until a day or two before Election Day to cram on the facts and decide how you’ll vote, especially on those confusing California ballot initiatives.

Each year I vow to do better, to start earlier, to not wait until the last minute. This is that year. Over the next five days we’ll be exploring the 11 statewide propositions that Californians are voting on — not just what the prop is about but also how it came to be on the ballot in the first place.

We’ll drop a new episode each day. Some will cover multiple props. Some just one. And by Friday afternoon you and I will be hella informed. We’re calling it Bay Curious Prop Week.
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ALLEN-PRICE: First up is Proposition 6, the effort to repeal the state’s new gas tax and vehicle fees. It has become one of the top issues for Republicans in California this year. But before we dive into it, let’s first understand how the tax and fees were passed in the first place.

STATE LEGISLATURE: Colleagues, we are back in session… if everyone would take their seats.

ALLEN-PRICE: It’s Apr. 6, 2016. The state Senate had already been in session for nearly three hours by the time they arrived at Senate Bill 1.

STATE LEGISLATURE: SB 1 is a long-term solution to our transportation infrastructure problem in California.

KATIE ORR: I remember that night. It was super late.

ALLEN-PRICE: KQED politics and government reporter Katie Orr was there.

ORR: And they got the bare minimum number of votes they needed in each chamber to get it through.

STATE LEGISLATURE: Ayes 27, nos 11. The measure passes.

ALLEN-PRICE: And can you briefly just go through what was SB 1? What were they voting on?

ORR: SB 1 was a gas tax and vehicle fee increase. Gas, normal gas that we all use in our cars, went up by 12 cents a gallon. Diesel fuel went up by 20 cents a gallon. And then car registration fees went up between $25 and $175, depending on the value of the car. So all that money together is expected to bring in $5 billion a year over the next decade. And that money gets split between the state government and local governments to fix freeways, bridges, local roads… various infrastructure projects around the state.

ALLEN-PRICE: Gov. Jerry Brown was a big advocate of SB 1 and right after it passed the Legislature, he held an impromptu press conference outside his office.

GOV. JERRY BROWN: I really want to say, I appreciate being a Democrat and what the Democrats did tonight.

ORR: And all the Democrats were crowding around him. You know, everyone wants their picture with the governor.

BROWN: The Democratic Party is the party of doing things, and tonight we did something to fix the roads of California.

ORR: But it wasn’t too much longer after that when we started hearing talk about recall efforts and efforts to repeal this tax.

NEWS AUDIO: New at 6 o’clock. A new gas tax is set to go into effect in just a couple of months, but it may not be in place for long if one San Diegan has his way.

ALLEN-PRICE: So take me from that room where Jerry Brown is celebrating his big win, the pass of SB 1. You know, what is happening, what are the Republicans doing, sort of, from that moment through today?

ORR: So we see an organizing effort by various Republicans to try and overturn this new tax. You saw Carl DeMaio.

ORR: He was a former city councilman in San Diego. He launched an effort. They got enough signatures, they put it on the ballot.

DEMAIO: The bottom line is we’ve got the second-highest gas tax in the country prior to this increase and yet we have some of the worst roads. Why is that? Well it’s not for lack of money. It’s really for lack of accountability.

ORR: You can make the argument to voters that, ‘hey, you already pay the state a lot of money. They have your money. They don’t need any more to fix the roads. What they need to do is manage the money they have better.’
[2018-prop prop=6]
ALLEN-PRICE: So we get Proposition 6 on the ballot. What are we voting on? What is in Proposition 6?

ORR: So Proposition 6 would repeal the increased gas tax that went into effect in November. So that 12 extra cents on your gallon of gas, that 20 extra cents on your gallon of diesel and those increased fees at the DMV, that would all be repealed.

ALLEN-PRICE: But that’s not all Prop. 6 would do. KQED transportation editor Dan Brekke explains what else we’re voting on with this prop.

DAN BREKKE: The second big part of this is that it would amend the state constitution so that any future gasoline tax increases or increases in the vehicle fees would be subject to approval of the voters.

ALLEN-PRICE: What would that mean for the future if this did pass and you did have that constitutional change?

BREKKE: Well, it becomes politically sort of impossible to get a gas tax increase. I mean, we’ve had all sorts of what they call ballot box budgeting, and this would just be maybe the most radical example.

ORR: So it really takes a lot of power away from the Legislature and puts it back with the voters, which some people would see as a great thing. Legislators tend to think that it would leave them a little bit hamstrung.

ALLEN-PRICE: So why has this become sort of the marquee issue for Republicans in 2018?

ORR: There was fear, especially in the primary, that they would not have a candidate in the governor’s race. So there was concern that it would be Gavin Newsom and Antonio Villaraigosa, both Democrats, in November. If that happens, Republicans don’t have a lot of reason to come out to the polls. So they were thinking, ‘well, shoot, we need something on the ballot because this is a huge year for the congressional races as well.’ There are about seven seats in California that Democrats think they have a really good shot at flipping from Republican to Democrat, and if Republican voters aren’t at the polls because they don’t have a candidate, then that makes those odds a lot better for Democrats. So fortunately for the Republicans, they did get a candidate into the November election, John Cox. He’s a businessman from San Diego, but he doesn’t seem to be getting as much traction as Gavin Newsom, and the gas tax is what they’re counting on to get their core voters out to the polls.

ALLEN-PRICE: Now, even though everyone is talking about this as the gas tax repeal, and they’re talking about what you pay at the pump, Dan says it might actually be the vehicle fee increase that people really notice.

BREKKE: The fees are steep under SB 1. Your vehicle fee — and then there’s a new transportation fee — is based on the market value of your car. So we bought a car last year, and I get my first vehicle registration form in the mail and the fee is over $400. And over $400 at one time, you feel that. Twelve cents a gallon is sort of a slow drip. This is kind of like a big hit all at once.

ALLEN-PRICE: The kind of surprising thing is all this fighting might not even matter in a few years.

ORR: The interesting thing about the gas tax is we’re having this big argument about it, right? But no matter what they really do, the gas tax is going to keep declining because people are getting more fuel-efficient cars, so they need less gas. Some people are getting electric cars — they don’t need any gas. So fewer and fewer people are actually buying the gas we need them to buy to maintain the roads. So at some point, they’re going to have to come up with a new funding mechanism anyway. And I think if this gas tax is repealed, it would just kind of speed up that process.

ALLEN-PRICE: Wow. If this passes, if Prop. 6 passes, what happens?

BREKKE: Those taxes and fees are repealed, period, and any future taxes and fee increases will need to be approved by the voters.

ALLEN-PRICE: If this doesn’t pass, what message does that send?

ORR: Well, I think it sends a message that California is facing a lot of issues. I mean, our roads, our cost of living, the increase in the homeless population, and at some point — and Gov. Jerry Brown says this a lot in his speeches — you’re going to have to pay to fix it. Like, sorry. That’s just the reality of the situation. You’re going to have to pay to fix it.

ALLEN-PRICE: Thanks to KQED reporters Katie Orr and Dan Brekke for walking us through this one. If you’ve still got questions about the gas tax, I’ve got good news for you. We’re hosting a Facebook Live on Oct. 10 about the gas tax, and we’ll be answering your questions. You can go ahead and RSVP ahead of time, so you’ll get this handy reminder when it rolls around. Details at BayCurious.org.

ALLEN-PRICE: That’s one prop down and 10 more to go for Prop Week. Tomorrow, we’re talking about whether daylight saving time should be all the time, how much space animals deserve and our state’s favorite topic — water. Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at KQED. I’m Olivia Allen-Price.

]]>Bay Curious Prop Week: If Proposition 6 is approved, it would repeal SB 1, the gas tax and vehicle fee increase passed by state lawmakers last year.If Proposition 6 is approved, it would repeal SB 1, the gas tax and vehicle fee increase passed by state lawmakers last year.<br />
<br />
Featuring KQED reporters Katie Orr and Dan Brekke. Produced by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED9810:24This Is Only a Test: San Francisco’s Tuesday Noon Sirenhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/10/04/this-is-only-a-test-san-franciscos-tuesday-noon-siren/
Thu, 04 Oct 2018 10:00:07 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11696396This weekly siren test even has its own Yelp page. Average rating: 4 stars.If you live or work in San Francisco, you’re likely familiar with the siren that goes off every Tuesday at noon.

“My entire life I’ve been hearing this siren,” says Bay Curious listener Jennifer Corbell, who grew up in the Sunset District. “Even if I get up in the morning and I know it’s Tuesday, it doesn’t really click for me until I hear that alarm going off.”

Corbell wanted to know more about the siren, so she asked Bay Curious to look into its history and how it works.

]]>This weekly siren test even has its own Yelp page. Average rating: 4 stars.Every Tuesday at noon, San Francisco tests the Outdoor Warning System. A siren and announcement ring out for 15 seconds. The system got its start in the 1940s.<br />
<br />
Reported by Julie Caine. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Chris Hoff, Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED979:34S.F. School Lottery: Time For It To Go?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/09/27/s-f-school-lottery-time-for-it-to-go/
Thu, 27 Sep 2018 10:00:58 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11694833Three San Francisco school board members are calling for an end to the current student assignment system.For years, parents have found the way students get assigned to public school in San Francisco to be overwhelming, stressful and baffling. The student assignment system, often referred to as ‘the lottery’, balances parental choice with the district’s goals of integrated schools.

Now that system could change.

On Sept. 25, three San Francisco school board members brought forward a resolution calling for the end of the current all-choice-based student assignment system.

In this episode of Bay Curious, we talk about this latest development, and explore how the current system works. Click the play button above to listen.

]]>Three San Francisco school board members are calling for an end to the current student assignment system.Three San Francisco school board members are calling for an end to the current student assignment system.<br />
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Reported by Katrina Schwartz. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey and David Weir. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED9611:26The Story Behind Belmont’s Painted Fire Hydrantshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/09/20/the-story-behind-belmonts-painted-fire-hydrants/
Thu, 20 Sep 2018 10:00:43 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11693132Fire hydrants in this town have one-of-a-kind paint jobs that date back to the early 1970s.After Ben Hilmer and his wife, Sarah, had a baby, he began taking daily walks with his daughter around his Belmont Hills neighborhood. He called this trek “dad loop.” And on “dad loop,” a fire hydrant caught his eye. It’s painted as a patriotic character, sporting a fading blue hat, and red-and-white striped pants.

Before long, Ben was noticing more and more of these decorated hydrants around town.

“Belmont doesn’t have an established downtown,” he says. “So the hydrants made it feel like a community. It made me proud to be from Belmont.”

Now he wants to know more about the hydrants. He asked Bay Curious: “Who painted the fire hydrants? And when were they painted?”

The Origin Story

We took Ben to visit his friendly local historian: Denny Lawhern. Denny has lived in Belmont more than 50 years, and he says the story of the hydrants goes back to the early 1970s.

The United States was preparing to celebrate its 200th birthday — the Bicentennial — in 1976. Communities around the country hosted parades, fireworks displays and concerts — and a few towns gave their fire hydrants patriotic makeovers. Belmont was among them.

Denny says Belmont was also marking 50 years of cityhood when residents came together to decorate more than 300 of the city’s hydrants.

“When you decided what colors you needed, you came to my house and I gave you little baby-food jars of three colors, or 20 colors, or whatever you needed,” says Judy King, a longtime volunteer with the Belmont Historical Society.

The hydrants even got a plug on KQED’s television show, ArtBeat:

At Belmont’s History Room in Twin Pines Park, Denny shows us three big photo albums documenting the hydrant project.

“I did a Betsy Ross,” Denny says. “And there are probably four to five Betsy Rosses around town, but all of them are different.”

In the albums are a few designs that definitely wouldn’t get the OK today, including a Chinese man in a coolie hat with a Fu Manchu mustache, and a Native American character called “Chief Running Water.” But Denny says, for the most part, the designs focused on the patriotic.

The Hydrants Today

Over the years, due to age or damage, the army of painted hydrants has shrunk. They were almost wiped out completely in the ’90s, when the 1991 East Bay Hills Fire changed state law. All fire hydrants had to be painted in uniform colors to identify water capacity. But Belmont’s “Happy Hydrants” were saved thanks to SB 1437, a bill signed in 1998. It allowed Belmont to use color-coded reflector buttons and curb markings near the decorated hydrants, instead of covering over their dapper duds.

Today, Denny thinks there are only about 50 to 60 of the more than 300 original painted hydrants left. And most are in rough shape. He says that a lot of the painted hydrants were in front of people’s houses, and that upkeep dried up as families moved away.

There have been a few Independence Day paintings after the Bicentennial, but nothing official. Denny hopes they can get enough interest to repaint them for Belmont’s 100th anniversary in 2026.

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]]>Fire hydrants in this town have one-of-a-kind paint jobs that date back to the early 1970s.Dozens of fire hydrants around the town of Belmont have one-of-a-kind paint jobs that date back to the early 1970s. <br />
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Reported by Suzie Racho. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Ethan Lindsey, Erika Kelly and Katie McMurran. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED956:16Could Creating One Bay Area City Solve the Housing Crisis?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/09/13/could-creating-one-bay-area-city-solve-the-housing-crisis/
Thu, 13 Sep 2018 10:00:08 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11691500What if we looked at a regional approach to housing? Could we save millennials, seniors, locals and future locals like we saved the bay?Reid Williamson is an urban planning nerd. He lives in Oakland and was recently on a trip to Los Angeles and was struck by it’s size and how long you could take to cross that single city.

Whereas up here, many people drive through multiple cities just to get to work each day. And those cities aren’t always working together.

“So Cupertino adds jobs at Apple, and Cupertino says, ‘We’ll pass on housing, it’s not our thing.’ And then the next town over says, ‘That’s not our thing either.’ And all of a sudden you’re all the way in Tracy,” he says.

Reid wonders if there’s a way to stop cities from “passing” on building housing.

He asked Bay Curious: “If the Bay Area united to become one city, would that solve some of our problems?”

How Things Are Now

Downtown Redwood City has a lot to offer its residents — transit lines that connect to all over the Bay Area, a variety of restaurants and shops, and plenty of jobs in its many office buildings. To Maureen Sedonaen, CEO at Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco, it was an ideal place for a new affordable housing project.

In 2014, Sedonaen proposed a nine-story building with 46 units.

“[The housing crisis] is a national problem. It’s a statewide problem. And in particular it’s heightened and underlined in our region,” Sedonaen says.

But to win approval from the city, Habitat’s proposal was cut by more than half — down to 20 units.

Then a neighbor, with a history of obstructing development projects, halted the project for more than a year. He cited an environmental concern, saying the building would increase traffic.

More than three years later, the lot Sedonaen hopes to build on still sits empty with a price tag that keeps on growing.

“Folks are going to live next door to people who tried to stop them from having their home. And that’s hard,” Sedonaen says.

While the housing crisis is a regional problem, local governments and their constituents have a huge say on how much affordable housing to allow.

“A lot of people in the Bay Area, particularly those that have stable housing, are very comfortable. They like what they have. When they see something new, they see only the downsides of the new,” says Egon Terplan, regional planning director at SPUR, a nonprofit focused on planning and government in the Bay Area. “We in California have turned over the idea of how much housing effectively to allow to the smallest unit of government, to a local government, which is the city, or the county in unincorporated areas.”

When land use is decided by local governments, it’s easier for vocal locals to protest projects.

“The people that are making the decision about how much growth to have in a community are the people who are there now,” Terplan says. “These voters tend to be slightly older and tend to be homeowners. … They’re not necessarily thinking about the next generation, or the millions of people who would like to be a part of this region.”

Locals protest new buildings for all kinds of reasons. They might say that a development is ugly, it blocks the sun, it isn’t affordable or it will create traffic. Terplan says while traffic fears could be addressed by building densely around transit, or creating more bike-friendly streets, for some it still might be too much change too fast.

Politicians have lost their jobs for being to willing to develop.

“Redwood City had a very good plan for growing its downtown, and evolving and enabling growth around rail. Lots of people moving there weren’t driving their cars. But a bunch of [politicians] that supported that development got thrown out,” Terplan says.

There’s resistance to change in cities across the Bay Area. You can find NIMBYism in Mountain View, Berkeley, Brisbane, the list goes on, and all that can compound — and we end up with less housing.

But what if it wasn’t local governments who had the power? What if, as Reid asked, plans came from the region instead?

If We Were One City

There are no serious proposals to unite the Bay Area into one city, but we thought it was an interesting question. After all, this region has a legacy of regional projects like the Save the Bay movement, which halted large-scale polluters and stopped cities from paving over the San Francisco Bay. Our regional parks are another example, which preserved the hills of the East Bay and the coast of Marin.

So what if we looked at a regional approach to housing? Could we save millennials, seniors, locals and future locals like we saved the bay?

Creating a City

We’re creating a hypothetical city. Let’s call it Reid Land (named after the question asker).

What are the boundaries of Reid Land? This is an oversimplification, but let’s say it includes all nine counties of the Bay Area. That would include 101 cities, around 7,000 square miles and an estimated 7.7 million people. For comparison, the city of Los Angeles has almost 4 million people on about 470 square miles.

The budget of Reid Land would be huge. According to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, if the Bay Area were a country, it’d be the 19th largest economy in the world — smaller than the Netherlands, larger than Switzerland. Money collected from regional taxes would be spent regionally.

“You would be thinking about where are the best places to grow in such a way we’re really getting development around our transportation infrastructure so that people aren’t going to drive as much,” Terplan says.

In this fictional scenario, the city might take underutilized land and build tall mixed-housing developments. Each building would have affordable housing, and there would be businesses and green space. Bike lanes would cross these super-dense neighborhoods and a train stop would be conveniently located at each neighborhood center. These trains could whisk you across the whole region, so traffic would be reduced and people could move about Reid Land easier and cheaper.

“Just think about all the things that New York City accomplished that didn’t happen here — 24-hour rail service connecting across these places,” Terplan says.

Drawbacks to One City

There are drawbacks to Reid Land.

For example, “If all transit was merged together, you might not have as much bus service in San Francisco as you do today because you would start spreading those resources across a bigger geography. And so for people that rely on transit in San Francisco, they would see that as a loss,” Terplan says.

Another consequence of amalgamating all these cities is that it would change voting demographics. People might not have their local interests represented. For example, urban constituents might be outvoted by suburban constituents.

“I would point to Toronto as a city that kind of did this to a certain extent. They expanded outward and had a much larger city. And at times you would have a mayor who represented a much different perspective from the traditional urban core,” Terplan says.

When Metropolitan Toronto amalgamated its six boroughs in 1998, it was very controversial. Twenty years later, people still debate if it was a good decision.

It’s also not clear if creating a single city would solve our housing problems. City council members might still find ways to block projects that would threaten the character of their neighborhoods, and vocal residents could continue to find ways to stop projects they found objectionable.

In fact, this whole thing is pretty unrealistic — 101 cities are unlikely to give up control to a single governing body.

Alternatives

We don’t need to have a single megacity to solve regional problems.

We have regional institutions that are thinking about big-picture issues facing the Bay Area. The problem is they don’t enforce plans or dole out consequences if cities don’t comply.

An alternative might be that regional plans and goals for housing become binding for cities.

One idea is a cap-and-trade program, but with housing. Each community would have a certain amount of housing and affordable housing it must build, and if a community doesn’t want to see that development in its own backyard, it could give money to an adjacent community to build that housing.

Perhaps, most realistically, it might just mean more collaboration, like in the case of transportation.

“How would it work if all the rail systems in the Bay Area really felt like one? You don’t have to merge them all together. But from a customer, it’s got to feel like a merger,” Terplan says.

There are collaborations currently underway. CASA (The Committee to House the Bay Area) meets roughly once a month with an aim to build actionable political consensus among Bay Area leaders. That said, in all likelihood, it wouldn’t support a single Bay Area city.

What does the question asker, Reid, make of all of this?

“If California is growing at X percent a year, we need X percent more gas stations we need X percent more day cares we need X percent more grocery stores. … We need X percent of everything. And so it’s how do we convince each area to grow at that rate? Or how do you do the cap-and-trade … which is pretty cool.”

Thanks to Ben Bradford for his reporting on Redwood City.

Correction: the drive from the Getty to Manhattan beach goes through multiple cities, not just Los Angeles.

]]>What if we looked at a regional approach to housing? Could we save millennials, seniors, locals and future locals like we saved the bay?If all the nine Bay Area counties merged, would that result in a more cohesive approach to the regional housing crisis?<br />
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Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julia McEvoy, Ethan Lindsey, Erika Kelly, Julie Caine, David Weir, Amanda Font, Carly Severn and Katie McMurran. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED949:39How Do You Define the ‘Bay Area’?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/09/06/how-do-you-define-the-bay-area-2/
Thu, 06 Sep 2018 10:00:08 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11689315Where the boundaries of this region are will vary according to who you ask and what you're looking to define.It’s the regional name you hear all the time – the San Francisco Bay Area. In more casual conversation, it’s the Bay Area, or the Bay.

But where the boundaries of this region are will vary according to who you ask.

Kristen Goldthorpe and her nephew Chase Osterman have been arguing about this for at least a year. They email each other articles and Osterman sends his aunt memes, like this one.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BichOC9h-2I/?utm_source=ig_embed

Goldthorpe is the traditionalist. “The official definition is the nine county definition,” she says.

That’s Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma. Among these nine counties are 101 cities, an estimated 7.756 million people and about 7,000 square miles.

Osterman argues those borders are too broad.

“For me the characteristics are based off geography. If you’re in an area where you can see saltwater – that’s the Bay Area. If you have a bridge, if you get fog from the bay, then that’s the Bay Area,” he says.

So places like Pleasanton? Not in Bay Area by Osterman’s definition. Pleasanton is separated from the water by hills.

Part of what makes the Bay Area hard to define is that we have three central cities — Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco.

Yet for some, even those cities are up for debate.

Take for example, my roommate. She doesn’t count San Jose because, so far, it’s not along BART, which is her idea of the Bay Area. Osterman also says San Jose should be considered part of a separate region – Silicon Valley.

While Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are often used interchangeably, data analysts do sometimes group San Francisco and Oakland as a separate metro area from San Jose.

The Origins of ‘The San Francisco Bay Area’

References to the term “The San Francisco Bay Area” first show up on maps in the early 1900s. But the borders weren’t consistent, and some references included Santa Cruz and San Joaquin counties.

“During World War II the region was growing very quickly, and a lot of the industrial development of the region was happening along the Bay shoreline,” says Egon Terplan, the regional planning director at SPUR, a Bay Area civic organization and urban planning policy group. “It was planners during WWII who defined the San Francisco Bay Area as nine counties, and that’s the definition that’s stuck.”

Regional agencies still use the nine county definition. To help you remember each of those nine counties, we asked two local musicians, Alison Faith Levy and Henry Plotnick, to make us a jingle. And oh, is it catchy.

But there are other ways to slice and dice where we live.

Expanding the Concept

“There is no kind of perfect definition of what a region is. It really depends what it is we’re trying to define,” Terplan says.

The boundaries might come down to why you’re looking at the Bay Area.

Consider first how the Bay Area is experienced as a commuter.

“As this region has gotten exorbitantly expensive, people continued to move further out both within those nine counties, and then to adjacent counties,” Terplan says.

While these people no longer live in the Bay Area, they still might work, shop, eat and go to church here.

Looking at a map of Bay Area commutes, you’ll see well-worn commute routes extending to Stockton, Modesto, Santa Cruz and even Sacramento. Even if they don’t live within the traditional boundaries, these commuters are part of the Bay Area fabric.

Are we more than the nine counties then? Are we 11 counties? Or even more?

Don’t Go Too Far

“We can’t just keep expanding the boundary because at some point you get to the state of California, or you get to the nation, you get to these much larger areas,” Terplan says.

The nine county definition at least puts a limit on it, but if you ask the average person, they have no idea where those county lines are. And honestly, when most people talk about the Bay Area, they’re not talking about economics or county borders, they’re talking about a cultural place.

Defining Us By Our Culture

If we use a cultural lens, how might we define the Bay Area?

Let’s start with food.

You might think California cuisine – the organic, local, farm-to-table goods served at Chez Panisse or The French Laundry. Or you might think of dishes made by the many immigrant groups that have made this place home – lumpia, hand-pulled noodles, injera or tikka masala. Once you start to think about it, there is no one taste of the Bay Area. It’s our diversity that defines us.

Next let’s consider the lens of sports. Do our beloved Golden State Warriors define us? Perhaps wherever you can find Dub Nation, that’s what you can call the Bay? This definition would include places like Fresno, and even pockets of New York City. Fresno is a stretch, though debatable. But New York City? Definitely not the Bay.

What about music? Growing up, I remember rappers shouting out the Bay Area. I asked rap journalist Eric Arnold where these artists are representing.

“You know Oakland has, I would say, the lion’s share of the talent, but you can find rappers all over the nine counties. There’s been hip-hop that’s come out of San Mateo. There’s been hip-hop that’s come out of Pittsburg,” Arnold says.

Just like it’s hard to identify one Bay Area taste, it’s hard to identify one Bay Area sound, he says. There have been a plethora of styles and eras – too hard to put a boundary around.

Could it be our politics? Bay Area voters do have a reputation, and track record, for being left leaning. Take the 2016 presidential election. The closer you get to the San Francisco Bay, the more “blue” a district gets.

“If you look at voting patterns, one of the things that seems pretty strong in the Bay identity is an association with environmental values,” Terplan says. “Every part of the Bay Area has done something to preserve open space at the edges of its community. Santa Clara County has an urban growth boundary, Marin County restricted development on two-thirds of the land, and the East Bay Regional Parks cut across two counties.”

Of course, not everybody is in step with the same politics or environmental values.

What does unite us all? The thing nobody can ignore? How expensive the Bay Area is. Cost of living is a definition that came up over and over again when I asked people how they define the Bay Area.

It’s a pretty grim outlook.

For now, easiest to stick with the nine county definition, but if we’re looking at the Bay Area as a cultural place it’s pretty hard to put a border on that.

]]>Where the boundaries of this region are will vary according to who you ask and what you're looking to define.Where the boundaries of this region are will vary according to who you ask and what you're looking to define.<br />
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Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julia McEvoy, Ethan Lindsey, Erika Kelly, Julie Caine, David Weir, Amanda Font, Carly Severn and Katie McMurran. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED938:31The Mystery of the ‘East Bay Walls’https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/08/30/the-mystery-of-the-east-bay-walls/
Thu, 30 Aug 2018 10:00:19 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11689492For more than a century, the stone walls scattered through the East Bay hills have proven a puzzle.
Reported by Dan Brekke. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Ethan Lindsey, Katie McMurran and Pat Yollin. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.For ages, people have puzzled over the so-called “East Bay Mystery Walls.” You can find small sections scattered all over the hills of the East Bay — from near San Jose through the Berkeley Hills. Who built these things? How long ago? And … why? Watch, listen and read to learn more about the many theories behind the walls.
]]>For more than a century, the stone walls scattered through the East Bay hills have proven a puzzle. - Reported by Dan Brekke. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho.For more than a century, stone walls scattered through the East Bay hills have proven a puzzle.<br />
<br />KQED9210:32Who’s Behind the Knitted Animals in San Francisco’s Civic Center?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/08/23/whos-behind-the-knitted-animals-in-san-franciscos-civic-center/
Thu, 23 Aug 2018 10:00:57 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11688020Some have called yarn bombing a feminist response to graffiti. Meet the sisters behind one of San Francisco's most prominent displays.Art is all around us in San Francisco, from the Mission murals to the Bay Lights. It even looms over us with the new video installation atop Salesforce Tower.

It has become such a part of our everyday visual inventory that it’s easy to overlook. Especially somewhere as busy as the Civic Center.

But Bay Curious listener Robin Duryee says she loves looking for unusual things when she’s walking around the city. The retired nurse has lived in San Francisco for 43 years. On a recent trek from BART, she spotted adorable knitted animals near City Hall: chameleons with leopard spots, brown fuzzy otters and giraffes licking branches with long pink tongues.

Which brings us to Robin’s question: What’s the story behind the knitted creatures on the trees in Civic Center?

What Robin saw in the Civic Center were yarn bombs: street art made from knitted or crocheted fabric. They can be as simple as a green snake wrapped around a bike rack or as elaborate as covering an entire bridge. It’s been called a feminist answer to graffiti.

Yarn bombing is often traced back to Texas artist Magda Sayeg. In the mid-2000s, she crocheted a door handle for her Houston boutique. That was followed by a knitted tube around a stop sign pole. She eventually moved on to much larger yarn bombs (including a bus in Mexico City), and inspired and encouraged knitters worldwide to create yarn bombs of their own.

The animals in the Civic Center were created by Lorna and Jill Watt, sisters from San Mateo. Each piece takes about a week to make. The rotating installation — which occupies Civic Center Plaza, a block of Fulton Street and U.N. Plaza — is part of an ongoing project called Knitting the Commons.

Working with the city, a nonprofit called the Trust For Public Land hopes to turn locations like the Civic Center into “joyful community places.”

For six years, the sisters have made this kind of work their full-time gig, creating all kinds of yarn and string art under the moniker Knits For Life.

“Yarn bombing is the perfect way to make something and then put it somewhere that is not our closet,” Jill says, laughing.

But one thing that makes a yarn bomb is the sense of surprise. Like graffiti, a lot of yarn bombs get put up when no one is looking.

“That first yarn bomb is so nerve-wracking, and you feel like such a vandal, and such a criminal,” Lorna says.

“We went after dark and she was installing them and I was a lookout,” says Jill. “A cop car passed … didn’t care. We did it and we didn’t get in trouble.”

That yarn bomb was so successful that it eventually led to work with companies like Old Navy, Twitter and Google.

But the sisters haven’t forgotten their crafty roots. To encourage more folks to get into yarn bombing, they recently hosted a Yarn-Bomb-Along.

]]>Some have called yarn bombing a feminist response to graffiti. Meet the sisters behind one of San Francisco's most prominent displays.Some have called yarn bombing a feminist response to graffiti. Meet the sisters behind one of San Francisco's most prominent displays. <br />
<br />
Reported by Suzie Racho. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Carly Severn, David Weir, Katie McMurran and Howard Gelman. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED918:00Is Ultimate Frisbee the Golf of Silicon Valley?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/08/16/is-ultimate-frisbee-the-golf-of-silicon-valley/
Thu, 16 Aug 2018 10:00:16 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11686772Why does it seem like a lot of start-up execs play ultimate frisbee and use that to network with VCs?Going way back, Americans trying to move up the corporate ladder have played golf — or at least, pretended to. But in Silicon Valley … well, people in Silicon Valley like to “think different.”

Can you name a sport played by the people who founded companies like Google, WhatsApp, SolarCity and Women Who Code?

The answer is ultimate Frisbee. (Or “ultimate flying disc” or simply “ultimate,” as Frisbee is a registered trademark.)

Afifa Tawil of San Jose helps organize regular ultimate games Monday and Wednesday nights at Encinal Park in Sunnyvale. What she wants to know from Bay Curious: Why does it seem like a lot of start-up execs play ultimate Frisbee and use that to network with venture capitalists?

A little backstory

There’s no question ultimate is popular in Silicon Valley. You might be surprised to discover it started in New Jersey rather than California. But California has a natural affinity for ultimate. In any given week, pickupultimate.com lists a couple dozen games on the Peninsula and in the South Bay.

What is Ultimate Frisbee?Ultimate is the team sport version of Frisbee — and shares similarities with basketball, football and handball.

We went to check out one of Tawil’s games to get the lay of the land. Encinal Park is your basic neighborhood park, with green grass, a baseball diamond and picnic tables. It’s also within walking distance of corporate complexes for the likes of Apple, LinkedIn and Synopsis.

You see a lot of people who are well into their Silicon Valley careers playing alongside young up-and-comers.

But if we were hoping to break into the gilded set in Tawil’s group, we were disappointed. She did introduce me though to Andrew Zill, a chemist who works for Thermofisher Scientific. He is also owner and manager of the San Jose Spiders.

I asked Zill if people approach him on or near the field, hoping to rub shoulders with someone rich and powerful, and got a big laugh.

“I don’t think that’s necessarily people’s goal. I think it just happens,” he says. “People mostly play for fun. I think that’s for the best because you actually make a real friendly relationship with somebody.”

Zill introduced me to Peter Nieh, an ultimate-playing venture capitalist who figures he may have missed a chance to invest early in Google because he was unaware he was playing with Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is on a variety of Forbes’ lists because he’s, well, rich and powerful.

Years passed, and Nieh attended a party at one of the world’s top ranked venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins. It was the the kind of party where you look at everybody thinking “Do I know you? Should I know you?” Nieh spotted that guy he plays ultimate with — and lo and behold, it was Brin.

“Even though he didn’t seem to want to talk to people, I probably should have reached out to him!” Nieh says, laughing.

“Another time, I was standing on the line of seven players before you kick off for the first point,” he says. “I’m just fumbling around with the Frisbee, and I turn it over, and it says ‘Brian Acton.’ You know, one of the co-founders of Whatsapp. I said to the guy next to me, ‘I didn’t know Brian Acton plays ultimate.’ The guy next to me says ‘Oh. He does play ultimate. He’s me.'”

Why ultimate?

In other parts of the business world, people schmooze on the golf course. It has a long history serving as a field of opportunity for business people trying to sidle up to a boss.

Perhaps nobody in Silicon Valley has four hours to play 18 holes or even two hours to play nine. The average ultimate game lasts an hour and a half. But it’s also true most people in the Valley went to college, and ultimate is a popular college sport.

Ultimate players can be very competitive, despite the fact much is made of the “spirit of the game,” a principle in ultimate that more or less means good sportsmanship. The ideal ultimate player resolves disagreements with opponents as she would with a friend, honest and amicable in both victory and defeat.

Nieh says, “There’s that whole sort of thrill of winning together as a team, which you get to do when you’re in a start-up. The game is also very dynamic. It’s fast paced. There’s infinite avenues and dimensions to learn. So I think that all lends itself to people who are inclined to always be learning — doing it with a lot of energy and passion.”

If someone wants to sidle up to Nieh because of his fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, he’s says he’s more than game to talk. In fact, Lightspeed sponsored in the San Jose Spiders to raise its profile with would-be entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

“It’s a blurred line between your professional life and your personal life. You know, some of my closest friends are people I do business with. It’s part of the job, and if you’re not of that mindset, you probably shouldn’t be a VC,” Nieh says.

So if Tawil wants to launch a start-up, she’s playing the right game. Although she might want to switch to a pickup game playing near where more VCs live: on the Peninsula, rather than in the South Bay.

Or she might want to take up cycling

There are a lot of very important people who cycle in packs, especially on the Peninsula. There’s even an acronym for them: MAMIL, short for “middle-aged men in lycra.”

But cycling is an expensive hobby, if you want to ride with VCs. A bike that will impress the boss costs several thousand dollars. For example, consider the Cervélo P5x eTap bike, yours for $15,000.

Also, you do take your life in your hands riding on those curvaceous roads alongside all those Teslas, McLarens and Prii. Much cheaper to try ultimate. All you need is a pair of soccer cleats and a game attitude.

]]>Why does it seem like a lot of start-up execs play ultimate frisbee and use that to network with VCs?Why does it seem like a lot of start-up execs play ultimate frisbee and use that to network with VCs?<br />
<br />
Reported by Rachael Myrow. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julia McEvoy, Erika Kelly, Ethan Lindsey and Howard Gelman. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED909:29Palms, Prophecy … and Permits? How Fortunetelling Works in the Bayhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/08/09/palms-prophecy-and-permits-how-fortunetelling-works-in-the-bay/
Thu, 09 Aug 2018 10:00:42 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11685811How the state Supreme Court cleared the way for psychics in California, and how regulation works.Seeking answers about what might lie ahead in life, and paying for it, has been around for centuries.

In the Bay Area, roadside signs advertising psychic services are a common sight, with many fortunetellers also conducting their business online. That’s because fortunetelling is totally legal in California. Not so in many other states.

In New York, the same palm reading or tarot session you can buy in the Bay Area could get a fortuneteller fined $500 — or 90 days in jail.

]]>How the state Supreme Court cleared the way for psychics in California, and how regulation works.How the state Supreme Court cleared the way for psychics in California, and how regulation works.<br />
<br />
Reported by Carly Severn. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Julia McEvoy, Ethan Lindsey and Howard Gelman. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED8912:00Ode to the Foghorn: The Sound of the Seahttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/08/02/ode-to-the-foghorn-the-sound-of-the-sea/
Thu, 02 Aug 2018 10:00:25 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11684132Take a trip around the San Francisco Bay and get to know our local foghorns -- where they are, how they work, who turns them on.San Francisco residents Andy MacKinnon and Jen Liu live in the Sunset District near Ocean Beach.

From their apartment, MacKinnon says, “We can see the fog rolling in off the ocean and creeping up the street until our house is completely engulfed by fog. And shortly after that happens, we start hearing foghorns.”

MacKinnon and Liu have a boatload of questions about the sounds that help vessels navigate safely through the water. They want to know:

Where are these foghorns?
How many of them are there?
Why do we still use them despite technologies like radar and GPS?
Who or what turns them on?

]]>Take a trip around the San Francisco Bay and get to know our local foghorns -- where they are, how they work, who turns them on.Take a trip around the San Francisco Bay and get to know our local foghorns -- where they are, how they work, who turns them on.<br />
<br />
Reported by Laura Klivans. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julie Caine, Julia McEvoy, Ethan Lindsey and Howard Gelman. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED8812:00Why So Windy? Why So Foggy? And What’s With Karl?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/07/26/why-so-windy-why-so-foggy-and-whats-with-karl/
Thu, 26 Jul 2018 10:00:13 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11682675We take a closer look at what causes the wind and fog to descend upon parts of our region each summer.Will Pearson bikes to work every day from his home in San Francisco’s Marina district. His morning ride along the Embarcadero is pleasant and calm, but he has noticed the wind picks up significantly on his ride home.

“I’ve always wondered why different parts of the day have such different levels of wind,” said Pearson.

]]>We take a closer look at what causes the wind and fog to descend upon parts of our region each summer.If you're coming to San Francisco in the summer, bring a jacket! We take a closer look at what causes the wind and fog to descend upon parts of our region each summer. Plus, a few bonus questions about famed Twitter account, @KarlTheFog.KQED879:19Why Is Lane Splitting Only Legal in California? And Is it Safe?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/07/19/why-is-lane-splitting-only-legal-in-california-and-is-it-safe/
Thu, 19 Jul 2018 10:00:49 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11681062People have a lot of feelings about lane splitting, but they don’t always have all the information.If you’ve ever driven in California, you’ve probably had a motorcycle drive between you and another car.

This is called lane splitting (also known as lane sharing or filtering), and a 2014 study found that 80 percent of California motorcyclists lane split on the freeway, with more than half saying they do it “often” or “always.”

People have a lot of feelings about it, but they don’t always have all the information.

]]>People have a lot of feelings about lane splitting, but they don’t always have all the information.People have a lot of feelings about lane splitting, but they don’t always have all the information.<br />
<br />
Reported by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julia McEvoy, Ethan Lindsey, Howard Gelman. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED9:22Hetch Hetchy Water’s Epic Journey, From Mountains to Taphttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/07/12/hetch-hetchy-waters-epic-journey-from-mountains-to-tap/
Thu, 12 Jul 2018 10:00:07 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11674188Take a journey with the Bay Area's drinking water -- from mountain to tap.If you live in San Francisco — or even certain parts of Alameda, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties — a portion of your drinking water travels over 150 miles to get to your tap.

It’s a journey that begins at the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park, a source of drinking water that has a well-known and crystal-clear reputation: It’s so clear that it isn’t filtered – only treated.

Bay Curious listeners Alex Kornblum, 8, and his dad, Heath Kornblum, were talking about their drinking water when they landed on this question:
How long does it take for water to get from Hetch Hetchy to San Francisco? And how far does it travel?

The Very Beginning

It all starts high in the Sierra. So high that the water isn’t water. It’s snow.

“The snow that we’re talking about is the snow that falls on the Tuolumne River watershed, which is 492 square miles,” says Suzanne Gautier, coordinator for citizen involvement for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

That snow melts into the Tuolumne River, and three smaller creeks that empty into the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.

“On average per year, San Franciscans consume what would be equal to 1 foot of snow covering that Tuolumne River watershed,” says Gautier.

To put this into perspective, it takes about 5 feet of snow to fill the whole reservoir. But if we just need 1 foot — it seems like there’s plenty of backup supply, right? Not always. During the recent six-year drought, there wasn’t enough snow.

“It must have been about 2015 or so,” says Gautier. “They were measuring the snow and it was very, very shallow when it should have been very much higher.”

At that point, the Public Utilities Commission started asking people to use less water.

The Journey Continues

Bay Curious listeners Alex and Heath are standing in front of a large map of the Hetch Hetchy water system at the Harry Tracy Water Treatment Plant in San Bruno.

Annie Li, a senior engineer at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, points to the yellow and brown squiggly lines on the map, revealing our water’s path from Hetch Hetchy to the Bay Area. She says the water first leaves Hetch Hetchy through the O’Shaughnessy Dam. Then it travels through a series of mountain tunnels.

That includes keeping the lights on at San Francisco schools and powering Muni light-rail vehicles, streetcars and trolley coaches.

Li says the water travels downhill the whole way (the system is entirely gravity-fed), whooshing through tunnels drilled through solid granite, and pipelines lined with concrete. Think of it as a giant underground water slide — twisting around mountains and under rivers — until it arrives at your tap.

“It takes about three days for the water to get from over here,” Li says, pointing to Hetch Hetchy on the map, “all the way into San Francisco.”

“Only three days?” remarks Alex. “I thought it would take longer than that. Like four or five days, maybe a week.”

His dad, Heath, then asks how they figured out that number. “Did you send like some kind of a probe in the water to time it?”

Li says they use flow meters throughout the system to calculate the answer. These meters will tell you how much water is moving through what pipeline.

“So we do a little bit of math and you say 167 miles, moving at 3 feet per second, equals about 83 hours,” says Gautier.

‘An Average Answer’

“So, 83 hours, that’s the final answer,” says Heath, processing the calculations. “It’s sort of an average answer.”

The travel time fluctuates because water operators are always releasing different amounts of water, depending on how much people use every day — and every season.

“During summertime people use more water. During wintertime, when it rains a lot, we don’t need to drink as much, or water our lawns, so we use a lot less,” says Li.

They also regulate the water due to diurnal shifts in demand since water use changes throughout the day — like when most of us are taking showers or washing dishes.

All in, water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir serves about 2.7 million residents and businesses.

But to Walk?

As Alex and Heath were getting ready to leave the treatment plant, there was still one more question they wanted answered: How long does it take to walk the same distance?

“I walk 3 miles an hour,” says Gautier. “So that’s, what, 167 miles?”

Heath chimes in to help with the calculations. “If we say 180 [miles] that’s divisible by 3. Right? So about 60 hours.”

They were actually spot on, according to Google maps. But Suzanne had some qualms.

“You might get there faster walking than the water would get here, but you wouldn’t be stopping for sleep,” says Gautier. “And if we were walking to Hetch Hetchy, we would be walking uphill. So that 3 miles an hour is going to be more like a mile and a half.”

]]>Take a journey with the Bay Area's drinking water -- from mountain to tap.Take a journey with the Bay Area's drinking water -- from mountain to tap.<br />
<br />
Reported by Sarah Craig. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi and Suzie Racho. Additional support from Julia McEvoy, Ethan Lindsey, Howard Gelman. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question or sign up for our newsletter at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED859:10Cracking the Bizarre Urban Legend of Alameda’s Little People Houseshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/07/05/cracking-the-bizarre-urban-legend-of-alamedas-little-people-houses/
Thu, 05 Jul 2018 10:00:15 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11652543A small street inadvertently becomes ground zero for so-called "Hobbit Hunters," but is there truth in the legends?During World War II, shipbuilding was big business along the West Coast. Hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the Bay Area held down jobs at places like the Alameda Works Shipyard.

This week’s question asker, Kim Kay, lives in Alameda — not far from that old shipyard.

A while back, she heard a story from a friend about a handful of small homes tucked away on a little street called Tregloan Court.

“I had heard that the houses on that street were built for small people during World War II for shipbuilding,” Kay says.

Rumor has it the shipyard employed little people — and these small houses were where they lived. Kay and her friend went to check them out.

“You know, when you first look at them you wouldn’t really notice that they were small,” Kay says. “But if you were to walk up to the front door, you would really realize that they are quite small.”

She was intrigued, though she had her doubts about the story.

“It seemed interesting,” she says. “But then my thought was, Kaiser was building ships in Richmond. Is there a street like this in Richmond? Are there small houses in San Francisco? I mean, if that’s true, there must be little houses up and down the coast of California.”

It turns out Kay and her friend aren’t the only people to have heard the rumor about the little people houses on Tregloan Court. There are mentions about it on Facebook, and quite a few Alameda locals nod in recognition when you ask them about it.

“It’s like if you walked into fairyland and you see a home that was designed small,” says Allen Tai, who works for the Alameda Planning Department.

The houses in question aren’t exactly miniature homes, though it’s possible that some people might see them that way because of the bucolic setting.

Tregloan Court is lined with fruit trees and babbling water fountains. The houses themselves are very cute. They’re made of wood and are smaller in scale than the grand Victorian homes that you also find on the street. They have period details and neat, well-groomed little yards.

More Bay Area Myths

Myth: Palo Alto’s black squirrels are the result of a Stanford experiment gone wrong.Busted: Those black squirrels are actually eastern gray squirrels whose parents both had a normal gene mutation for fur color. They’re basically the redheads of the squirrel world.Question Asker: Eyal Cidon

But while the “Middle Earth” quality to these buildings may explain why they’re associated with little people and the like, KQED’s research suggests there’s absolutely no validity to the story about the homes serving as dwellings for little shipyard workers during wartime.

Experts we spoke with included people in the Alameda Planning Department, neighbors and a number of local historians. They were unanimous in their debunking of the myth.

“I don’t believe they were really built for little people,” says Barbara Stuber, who has lived in one of the larger Victorian homes on Tregloan Court since 1975. “I mean we don’t have little leprechauns living in our street, even though you have a little fairy door down there on the telephone pole.”

Old building permit records at Alameda City Hall show the homes in question were built some years before the Second World War, in the mid-1930s. And while they’re modest in size, at around 1,000 square feet with two or three bedrooms, the homes are nothing near the scale of the tiny houses that are all the rage these days.

That being said, the lots are pretty small. City records show Tregloan Court originally had larger lots that were divided up to get more bang for the buck. Historian Minor puts this in the context of the real estate boom that started in the late 1800s.

“A lot of the old historic Gold Rush-era farms in the east end of Alameda, which is where the town began, began to be subdivided and developed with housing at this time,” Minor says. “Tregloan Court represents sort of a cameo miniature example of this.”

The diminutive cottages on Tregloan Court aren’t even all that unique. There are the Stonehenge bungalows on Alameda’s Santa Clara Avenue, built around 1930. There’s also a series of small dwellings at Marion Court on Alameda’s west side. And there are similar developments in other parts of the Bay Area, too.

And no historian KQED spoke with had ever heard of shipyards in the area expressly employing little people as part of the workforce. (Though, of course, their employees probably came in all shapes and sizes.)

More Bay Area Myths

Myth: It’s illegal to eat an orange in the bathtub in California.Busted: The word “orange” appears in state law 372 times, but not once does it have anything to do with a bathtub.Question Asker: Zachary Nemirovsky

No one really has a clue about how the myth got started and spread, though. It was most likely some combination of the houses being cute and on the smaller side, Alameda’s shipbuilding past, and the rumor-spreading power of the internet.

Minor says there are a bunch of weird myths relating to Alameda that seem to rise to the surface with the help of the web, like the one he shared about the lunatic asylum located on the shore of the marsh across from Oakland.

“We do know from research that there is no such asylum,” Minor says.

Still, it’s strange that the little people urban legend about Tregloan Street persists when the houses themselves aren’t even all that small.

Yet the tenacity of the myth is what made it hard for KQED to track down any residents of the small homes on Tregloan Court, even after we put hand-delivered letters in mailboxes on headed notepaper. After hearing nothing for weeks, one resident sent us a long email asking if we’d consider dropping the story.

The resident, who did not want to be named for privacy reasons but ultimately gave permission to mention his email in this story, says he’s sick of being harassed by what he and his family call “Hobbit Hunters.”

“A couple of times, we have actually been sitting eating dinner when people will come right up in our yard to our dining room window and take pictures of us, and the inside of the house,” the resident writes in his email. “Sometimes, whole families will get out of their car just to take their picture on our doorstep.”

He also says he’s 6-foot-3 — and the home he lives in suits him just fine.

“None of the houses are ‘two-thirds-sized’ homes,” he writes. “That would infer that doorways, countertops, etc. are built to a smaller scale, less than standard height. Some of the homes, including mine are smaller homes, yes, but are not scaled down, and there are many homes around different parts of Alameda that are very similar. I think you will find that really the only thing that differs is the street itself is smaller than almost all of the other streets.”

]]>A small street inadvertently becomes ground zero for so-called "Hobbit Hunters," but is there truth in the legends?A small street inadvertently becomes ground zero for so-called "Hobbit Hunters," but is there truth in the legends?<br />
<br />
Reported by Chloe Veltman and Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi, Suzie Racho, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED849:48Is Rent Control Working and Should We Have More or Less of It?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/06/28/is-rent-control-working-and-should-we-have-more-or-less-of-it/
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 10:00:06 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11677380Rent control is in at least 15 California cities, but even in those cities there are many limits on what can be rent controlled. A proposition on the November ballot could get rid of those limits, but should it?We all know the refrain: “The rent is too damn high.”

In San Francisco, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is more than $3,000.

But some living in rent-controlled apartments pay way less than that. That’s because their landlords are limited in how much they can raise rental prices each year.

As California’s housing crisis continues to roar on, some wonder if expanding rent control could help.

But how exactly does it work? And is it effective?

Where You Can Find Rent Control

Right now at least 15 cities in California have some form of rent control. Most of them also have rent control laws that limit when landlords can force tenants to leave.

In the Bay Area, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland and Berkeley have had rent control for decades. But even in those cities, not every home is under rent control because there is this law that limits the reach of rent control.

The Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act

In the mid-’90s, California was going through an affordable housing crisis. To encourage more housing development, two politicians, Democratic Sen. Jim Costa of Fresno and Republican Assemblyman Phil Hawkins of Bellflower, wanted to curb rent control.

First, it allowed landlords to raise the rent to whatever they want after a tenant moves out of a rent-controlled apartment. This is called vacancy decontrol.

“I see apartments all the time, they’re total pieces of crap. And they’re charging like a bazillion dollars, right? But once you get into that apartment, they’re limited in how much more they can raise it. Every time a person moves out they can reset it,” says Matt Levin, a data reporter for CALmatters and co-host of the housing podcast “Gimme Shelter.”

Before Costa-Hawkins was adopted, some cities had vacancy control, which caps the rent on a unit even after a tenant moves out.

Second, Costa-Hawkins barred certain kinds of housing, like most single-family homes and condos, from being rent-controlled. It also doesn’t allow rent control on buildings built after Feb. 1, 1995.

For the cities that already had rent control on the books, Costa-Hawkins froze their construction cutoff dates where they stood. In Oakland nothing built after 1983 can have rent control, Berkeley is 1980, and in San Jose and San Francisco it’s 1979.

“So anything new and nice-looking in San Francisco is not going to have rent control on it,” says Levin.

Studying Rent Control

“There is not as much really great research on the effects of rent control as you might think,” Levin says. “One of the best studies that has been done in my opinion, and in the opinion of a lot of people who research this topic, is a Stanford University study.”

The study is by Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian.

Diamond says that many arguments for or against rent control are theoretical, but reality doesn’t always match the theory. Diamond, McQuade and Qian got data showing the address changes of San Franciscans over about 18 years, starting in 1994 when rent control expanded to small multifamily housing.

Who Benefits?

“We find for the tenants that were living in San Francisco at the time of the law change, [that became covered by rent control,] they benefit dramatically,” says Diamond.

People who ended up in rent-controlled apartments at the time of the law change saved $7 billion over 18 years.

People over 40 saved the most, and saw three times the benefit of younger people — probably because young people can’t stay put in the same way. They need to leave those rent-controlled apartments because of new jobs, marriages and growing families.

“[Rent control] can create big distortions of forcing people to stay in the ‘wrong’ apartment. You can imagine an old lady living in a four- bedroom apartment because it’s so much cheaper than a one bedroom, and on the flip side you can imagine a young person who has kids staying in a studio because they can’t pay super expensive rent elsewhere,” says Diamond.

Who Does Not Benefit

“Landlords really, really dislike rent control,” says Diamond. “This is a very costly policy for them. It forces them to provide these subsidies.”

While the price ceiling of rent control limits earnings, rent control cannot impede landlords’ ability to get a “fair market return” on their property. If landlords who own rent controlled properties want to charge tenants more, they need to present reasoning. For example, if the landlord adds a pool and sauna to an apartment building in Berkeley, that landlord could petition the rent board to increase the rent ceiling.

With their earnings capped, some landlords decided to leave the rental business altogether by selling or converting their apartments. In 18 years of the study, Diamond found that 15 percent of those newly rent-controlled apartments had been taken off the rental market entirely.

“That decreases the supply of rental housing,” Diamond says, creating a new group of people who don’t benefit — other renters. “If supply goes down, prices have to go up for supply to equal demand.”

With more people trying to get into fewer apartments, landlords can charge more for those apartments. Diamond’s study found that across the city rent went up by 7 percent and cost $5 billion.

Meaning newcomers and renters without rent control end up paying more.

Should We Get Rid of Rent Control?

Because our form of rent control can create market distortions and drive costs up for many people, Diamond and her colleagues think it needs to change. They propose that the state find another way to provide cost stability to renters without placing the burden on landlords.

Many economists believe rent control should be eliminated, because developers would build more and that new housing would reduce demand and lower prices.

While rent control may worsen affordability in the long term, some say we are in a crisis and low-income renters need these kinds of protections.

“The Bay Area Economic Institute — which is not a bastion of socialism but it is more aligned with the business interests of the Bay Area — did a simulation of all these different types of housing policies and what it would do to San Franciscans,” says Levin. “They found if you did away with rent control, that is the worst thing you could do if you wanted to preserve the affordability of the people currently in the city.”

The simulation found that getting rid of rent control would mean more than 16,000 households would find themselves in unaffordable housing overnight.

Tenant advocates say that rent control is important for preserving diversity in cities by protecting vulnerable populations.

Tony Samara of the advocacy group Urban Habitat says this is a civil rights issue and that rent control is a frontline defense against resegregation in the Bay Area. “When you look at where the impact [of displacement] is most heavy, it’s disproportionately on black and brown communities,” says Samara.

“Renters are generally lower-income than homeowners, so rent control targets the appropriate demographic,” says Leslie Gordon of Urban Habitat. “That said, all renters regardless of income are deserving of stable rents.”

Should We Expand Rent Control?

Samara argues that the problem with rent control causing market rate rents to get more expensive isn’t the result of too much rent control, but not enough.

“If you have a city that passes controls on pollution and then the polluting industries pick up and move to the next city, do you blame the regulation against pollution or do you blame the polluter who’s trying to get around the regulation?” Samara asks.

While landlords of rent controlled apartments don’t earn the maximum possible profit, Gordon believes they are making enough.

“In a scarcity rent situation landlords can make tons of money simply because they own a property. It’s not because they’re investing in it or providing a better good to their tenants, it’s because they own property in a period where urban land values are rising rapidly,” says Gordon.

Some groups are working to expand rent control. A measure to overturn Costa-Hawkins will be on the November ballot in 2018. If passed, it opens the door for cities to expand rent control to every single unit, if they elect to do so.

Potential Consequences of Expansion

Landlords, developers and their representatives are deeply opposed to the expansion of rent control.

“Developers already face a number of hurdles when building, like nimbyism, environmental restrictions and the soaring costs of land and labor,” says Tom Bannon, CEO of the California Apartment Association.

Tenant advocates say just building isn’t enough. New luxury housing depreciates too slowly to adequately alleviate the housing burden of low-income people. Some say cities should focus on building low-income housing while preserving and protecting affordable housing that already exists.

California’s high costs of building disincentivize developers, and Bannon worries that if rent control expands to new construction, investors might leave the state entirely.

“You would have a serious reduction in the construction of any new apartments because builders and banks and individuals would not be willing to take the risk,” he says.

That’s housing we really need.

Just to keep up with population growth California needs 180,000 new homes each year. And California has been averaging less than 80,000 new homes.

]]>Rent control is in at least 15 California cities, but even in those cities there are many limits on what can be rent controlled. A proposition on the November ballot could get rid of those limits, but should it?Rent control is in at least 15 California cities, but even in those cities there are many limits on what can be rent controlled. A proposition on the November ballot may get rid of those limits, but should it?<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED839:51The Origins of Bay Area Place Nameshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/06/21/the-origins-of-bay-area-place-names/
Thu, 21 Jun 2018 10:00:47 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11676186California was named after a fictional island for black Amazon-like warrior women, ruled by Queen Calafia. What about Bay Area names?
Reported by Jessica Placzek and Dan Brekke. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Amanda Font and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.Every name has a story.

Take “California” for example. The name comes from a best-selling romance novel written in 1510 called “Las Sergas de Esplandián” or “The Deeds of Esplandián.”

In the book, the author describes California as a remote island full of gold and precious stones. The island was protected by beautiful black warrior women who lived like the Amazons and served their ruler, Queen Calafia. The novel was so popular that when Spanish explorers arrived, they named their discovery after the mythical island of California.

]]>California was named after a fictional island for black Amazon-like warrior women, ruled by Queen Calafia. What about Bay Area names? - Reported by Jessica Placzek and Dan Brekke. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi,California was named after a fictional island for black Amazon-like warrior women, ruled by Queen Calafia. What about Bay Area names?<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek and Dan Brekke. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Amanda Font and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED828:24The Forgotten Men of the Point Reyes Life Saving Servicehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/06/14/bay-curious-point-reyes-cemetery/
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 10:00:43 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11673429A tiny hidden cemetery reveals the brutal realities of saving shipwrecked sailors in the 19th century.

“You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back” — motto attributed to the Life Saving Service, 19th century

The words “California coast” conjure a certain image — sun-drenched beaches, warm waters — in the popular imagination. Point Reyes National Seashore, 50 miles north of San Francisco, does not fit that image.

One of the foggiest, windiest places in North America, for hundreds of years this stretch of the Pacific Ocean has posed incredible danger to seafarers. And hidden away inland, just off the road to Point Reyes’ famous lighthouse, there’s a tiny burial ground that conveys the human cost of this rugged, treacherous coastline.

The Historic Life-Saving Station Cemetery is concealed within a knoll of cypress and eucalyptus trees, and most visitors drive right past it. Here, simple headstones mark the bodies of four young immigrants from Sweden, Finland and Germany. Known as “surfmen”, they were members of what was then called the Life Saving Service — what we now know as the United States Coast Guard. All four lost their lives working in Point Reyes in the 1890s.

From the cemetery, you can just see the exact stretch of coastline on which those surfmen spent their last months at Point Reyes’ very first Life-Saving Station. This area is known as the Great Beach.

“That is the most treacherous stretch of water out here,” says John Dell’Osso, who has worked in Point Reyes for the National Park Service for 35 years.

Point Reyes stretches out 10 miles from the mainland into the Pacific Ocean, resulting in its infamous high coastal winds and thick shrouding fogs. Even the logbooks of Sir Francis Drake’s ship in 1579 complain of “the stinking fogges” here.

This is where the first recorded shipwreck on the West Coast occurred: a Spanish galleon, torn on the rocks in 1595. Until the lighthouse was built in 1870, sailors on these waters making the turn into San Francisco Bay had no warning of the jagged land they were about to strike.

The Park Service says that before the Life-Saving Station was built around 1890, the beaches were littered with shipwrecks — that residents often had to watch as those passengers and crew drowned in the waters in front of them. They couldn’t go in because in a place like Point Reyes, the surf is the thing that will kill you.

We don’t know a lot about the young men lying in the cemetery, but we know how dangerous, punishing and isolating their work was in the Life Saving Service. At the Point Reyes Lighthouse, says Dell’Osso, winds “have been clocked at 133 miles per hour. We close the [visitor] stairs at 40 miles per hour because you can barely stand in that condition.” Regardless, he says, “if there was a rescue to be done, these individuals did it.”

There were no motorized boats, or radios, or powerful searchlights like the Coast Guard has today. These men were dragging their small lifeboats across the hard sand, through mounds of driftwood, and rowing out to shipwrecks by hand, in swells that could reach as high as 12 feet.

“If you’ve ever seen some of the stormy conditions in the Point Reyes Seashore when we have pounding surf coming in,” says Dell’Osso, “it’s frightening to think that they did that.”

Often, when the waves prevented the surfmen’s rowboat from reaching a sinking ship, they would have to rescue the passengers one by one using a “breeches buoy”: a pair of thick, wide pants sewn into a life-ring.

It was into this that exhausted, freezing, wet survivors would slide their legs and be hauled over to safety, high above the raging waves.

When they weren’t making rescues, these men were relentlessly training — ready to launch themselves into the ocean at a moment’s notice. So dangerous was their work that the four surfmen lying in the cemetery didn’t even die making a rescue, but in training.

Fred Carstens, of Germany, and Andrew Anderson, a Swede, died on a freezing December morning in 1890, as they were pulling their training boat back onto shore. According to the station’s logbooks, a huge breaker rose and overturned the vessel onto them, inflicting massive internal injuries.

The account of the accident in the Sausalito News relates how Anderson in particular was dragged from the surf “insensible, with the blood pouring from his mouth.” Both men died within hours.

Over two years later, the second Swede, George Larson, died in the same spot, in exactly the same way. Yet their Finnish crewmate, John Korpala, wasn’t anywhere near a boat when he died in 1891. After hours patrolling the freezing wet beach, he went to bed with chills and never woke up. The coroner’s verdict was a hemorrhage in his lungs.

“I think they were kind of a different breed of individuals,” says Dell’Osso. “So I’m not sure if they were frightened, or they were, like, gung-ho to go out.”

Regardless, he says, their story is one “about lives of sacrifice and service. And that’s exactly what they did.”

At the turn of the century, the Life Saving Service was combined with the United States Revenue Cutter Service to form the Coast Guard we know today. In 1927, the station was moved to Chimney Rock, away from the deadly surf of the Great Beach.

This Lifeboat Station still stands today, complete with pier and “marine railway” tracks used to launch the agency’s new motorized lifeboats. Although it demonstrates just a few decades’ technological advancement, this newer building is a world away from the hand-dragged rowboats commanded by the earlier surfmen.

Today, only the tiny cemetery a few miles away bears witness to the life and work of those first rescuers. Yet the reason that the four surfmen are buried here, of all places, lies a little further up that hill in the form of more headstones — all belonging to a local Swedish family.

Back when the surfmen died, the land belonged to a dairy rancher called Peter Henry Claussen. This is the Claussen family graveyard, on the historic G Ranch, and he made space here “realizing that there was no [other] place to bury these individuals — and they were for the most part very young men,” according to Dell’Osso. Claussen himself is buried here, too.

Claussen’s gift doesn’t attract too much attention these days, and it’s often mistakenly attributed to his own father, Hinrik, who by then had been dead for several decades.

As for Claussen’s motives for donating this land on his own family’s burial plot, a place he’d already buried his father and his wife, it’s generally assumed he felt a sense of duty to fellow immigrants — the community’s young local heroes with no real family in the United States.

Only a tribute to him in the Marin Journal, written by a friend in 1915 just after his death, may offer a little further insight.

In it we learn that Claussen himself had been a sailor, from the age of 15 — that it was men like him that the surfmen sacrificed their lives to rescue. He was also no stranger to the terror of life-saving, having assisted in the rescue effort when a British ship called the Warrior Queen ran aground in Point Reyes back in 1874.

The tribute also makes clear how tight-knit the Scandinavian community at Point Reyes was in those days, asserting that “all the Scandinavians on Point Reyes called him not Captain but ‘Papa Claussen.’ They came to him for advice, sympathy, and comfort, which he never denied them.”

So perhaps the four immigrant surfmen weren’t just courageous strangers to Claussen. These young men may have been his friends.

But perhaps it’s right that a place as hidden and still as this keeps a few secrets yet.

]]>A tiny hidden cemetery reveals the brutal realities of saving shipwrecked sailors in the 19th century.A tiny hidden cemetery reveals the brutal realities of saving shipwrecked sailors in the 19th century.<br />
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Reported by Carly Severn. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Victoria Mauleon, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED8111:46The Serpent Statue in San Jose That People Think Is Something Elsehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/06/07/the-serpent-statue-in-san-jose-that-people-think-is-something-else/
Thu, 07 Jun 2018 10:00:54 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11668265Is the Quetzalcoatl sculpture in San Jose the best tribute to the city's Mexican heritage? It's a matter of debate.In recent years, there have been a lot of political battles over public sculptures, mostly because those sculptures lionize figures from a past we’re not so proud of anymore. But in San Jose, debate has bubbled for decades over a sculpture that was intended to celebrate the city’s Mexican-American heritage.

It’s a coiled snake made of Plaster of Paris and colored a dull earthy black. The snake is prominently placed on the south end of the Plaza de Cesar Chavez, a place where San Jose locals come to party, protest and just hang out.

If you stand near the sculpture long enough, local children will walk by and do a double take, before asking their parents, “Is that … poop?”

“I probably heard this story before, but it hasn’t stick [sic] to me and I keep wondering what it means,” says Daniel Fonseca. He is an interior designer and musician originally from Columbia who has lived in downtown San Jose for 20 years.

“I have a little bit of sense. I mean, it’s related to the Mexican-American community, to the Aztec community, I want to think. But I never really stared at it and spend time with it and find out what the significance of it is,” says Fonseca.

The Winged Serpent God

The sculpture is of Quetzalcoatl (say que-tzal-coh-what-l), the Aztec god of wind and wisdom, commonly referred to as “the feathered serpent.” This iconic, dragonlike deity hails from Mesoamerican Teotihuacan, an ancient metropolis that once flourished northeast of modern-day Mexico City. Teotihuacan dominated the regional cultural landscape for centuries, and the art from Teotihuacan continues to resonate today throughout the Americas.

You’ve seen Quetzalcoatl or his name, whether you realize it or not, all over the place, including on some Aeromexico planes.

Quetzalcoatl also shows up as a colorful monster in video games, and there’s a chocolate bar by Bay Area confectioners Guittard that is named Quetzalcoatl. (I tasted one for research purposes, and it was good.)

In fact, there are so many gorgeous depictions of Quetzalcoatl many people wonder how a sculpture that invites laughter plopped down in San Jose.

How It Came To Be

There is a plaque by the base of this sculpture, but as we’ll explain shortly, it doesn’t really do a good job of describing the sculpture. Instead, we ask for the backstory from Scott Herhold, a retired columnist for the Mercury News who periodically conducts tours of the public art in downtown San Jose.

He tells us that, back in the 1980s, San Jose’s Redevelopment Agency wanted a statue to honor Thomas Fallon, the 10th mayor of San Jose.

“He was an adventurer, an Irishman, one of the first Anglo settlers here,” Herhold says. “In 1846, he raised the flag, the American flag. Remember, this was part of Mexico still. From that point on, of course, San Jose really has been Anglo rather than Mexican.”

Well, it’s been Anglo and Mexican-American, but Anglos dominated San Jose’s civic narrative for more than 100 years. But by 1988, when artist Robert Glen was commissioned to create a tribute to the Anglo hero, attitudes had changed. The Redevelopment Agency got blowback from the Mexican-American community. A new committee was established to pick a new artist.

Herhold continues, “They eventually settled on a man by the name of Robert Graham. Graham had originally designed some work for the Redevelopment Agency. He was also part Latino himself.”

The San Jose State alum was highly regarded nationwide. His sculptures are on view all over the United States, including a commanding bronze memorial to Duke Ellington in New York’s Central Park and a couple diminutive nudes outside the Federal Building in San Jose.

Graham’s first drawings of Quetzalcoatl were of a winged creature. “They liked it very much,” Herhold says, pausing for effect. “It came out differently than they thought.”

There is a plaque at the base of the sculpture, but it doesn’t describe what you’re looking at. It describes a concept that was killed. “The winged serpent showed him sort of upright, with the wings out. Think almost of a peacock. It had that kind of feel to it,” Herhold says.

About six weeks before the unveiling, he says, Graham told the Redevelopment Agency that his concept had changed. “It was just a change in his artist conception.”

Conflicting Stories

I should stop here and tell you that’s not what Blanca Alvarado remembers. The retired San Jose politician was on the committee that worked with Graham, and her story differs from Herhold’s.

“I think Scott and I need a little bit of time, and he needs a little more education, so that as he describes the piece on his tour, he’ll be better informed,” she says.

Alvarado says she also preferred Graham’s first, winged take on Quetzalcoatl. “It was quite elegant. It was a very, very beautiful piece.”

Alvarado says that Graham’s original sculpture was axed by the Redevelopment Agency. They worried that the domed pedestal he proposed would become an attractive place to sleep for homeless people.

“He was very frustrated by that objection. So he went to Mexico, and he stood there for three months at Teotihuacan, and he studied the stonework,” says Alvarado.

His second proposal stems directly from that study. The coiled, stylized rattlesnake version of Queztecoatl was a thing, is a thing. Coatl, after all, means serpent in the Aztec language Nahuatl.

Graham made a small version of his final sculpture as a gift for Alvarado. She doesn’t know what material he used, but it’s green, the color of oxidized copper. It now sits in her backyard and it’s quite lovely.

The thing is, Graham opted for his sculpture in the park to be that earthy black and, coiled as it is, it suggests something else. Intentionally so? That’s an open question.

Graham’s (Possible) Revenge

“I think it’s fundamentally an act of revenge,” Herhold says.

Is Herhold telling us Graham wanted revenge because his fabulous proposal for a winged serpent got the ax? No. Herhold thinks it’s revenge for an entirely different project.

“Robert Graham had designed, as I mentioned, some work for the Redevelopment Agency. The initial idea was to build gateways on the four sides of the city. So one on the south, one on the north, one on the west and one on the east. And the Redevelopment Agency showed the media some pictures of this, and the Mercury News in particular sort of said thumbs-down to this. This is a silly idea, these gateways. So Graham had to withdraw that idea. And the feeling, at least among the Redevelopment Agency people I know, was that this was his act of revenge for the loss of that earlier commission,” says Herhold.

How can he be so sure that the Quetzalcoatl sculpture is indeed an act of revenge?

Herhold acknowledges, “I don’t think you can be sure. Graham is now dead, and as far as I know, he never specifically said this was an act of revenge. But I can tell you the people that I know who were very well placed in the Redevelopment Agency, and even his mother, say this was his revenge.”

That prompts this response from our Bay Curious question asker Daniel Fonseca. “If it was an act of revenge, I think it was very well captured, you know, because that is the first reaction: poop!”

But then Fonseca adds, “There must be a way to elevate this sculpture, to not have ‘poop’ be the first thing that you think. Like add some gardens around. Something that will bring out its significance. It’s set on a pedestal, so even the pedestal could be painted. It clearly needs some work.”

On that score, at least, Blanca Alvarado agrees. “It needs some sprucing up,” she says.

The sculpture was recently power-washed, but that’s it for the foreseeable future, according to San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs, which maintains the installation.

That said, Alvarado is a veteran political activist, and she says she’s fixing to get busy at City Hall, pushing for some imaginative improvement to San Jose’s Queztecoatl.

]]>Is the Quetzalcoatl sculpture in San Jose the best tribute to the city's Mexican heritage? It's a matter of debate.Is the Quetzalcoatl sculpture in San Jose the best tribute to the city's Mexican heritage? It's a matter of debate.<br />
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Reported by Rachael Myrow. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED8011:20Are There Really More Dogs Than Children in S.F.?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/05/24/are-there-really-more-dogs-than-children-in-s-f/
Thu, 24 May 2018 10:00:48 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11669269PLUS: How many of those dogs could fit on a Muni train ... and other pressing canine questions.You see them everywhere in San Francisco: luxury doggy daycares and hotels, dog gyms, dog spas, even dog bakeries.

It’s pretty clear that San Francisco loves dogs.

Today, in honor of our furry companions, we’re going to be answering a few questions about dogs.

Do San Franciscans Have More Dogs or Children?

If you’ve lived in San Francisco for more than a few months, you’ve probably heard the oft-repeated line: There are more dogs than children in San Francisco. But is it true?

“I think that there are less children in San Francisco than a typical city due to the many reasons it’s hard to raise them in the city,” says Bay Curious listener Michele Speck. “But I also think it’s hard to have a dog in this city. So that’s what makes me question if there are actually more dogs than children.”

The Answer

The saying is true! There are more dogs than children in San Francisco.

According to the American Community Survey, in 2016 there were about 115,000 children under 18 living in the city. At the same time, San Francisco Animal Care and Control estimated there were about 120,000 to 150,000 dogs in the city.

However, getting into why there are more dogs than children in San Francisco is a bit more complicated.

There Aren’t Many Children in S.F.

Turns out that San Francisco is not barking mad for dogs. It actually just doesn’t have very many children. San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any major city, according to U.S. census data.

About 18 percent of households in San Francisco have children under 19, whereas nationwide the average is 29.4 percent. You might think it has to do with city life, but that isn’t the case. In Los Angeles, 33.4 percent of households have children, and in New York City it’s 30.5 percent. The only other city where fewer than 20 percent of households have kids is Seattle.

But this could change.

Since 2010 there has been a slight increase in the number of children under 5, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The question is whether or not the families of these newborns will stay in San Francisco.

Housing is one factor that might determine whether young families stay.

Since 2010, 61 percent of new market rate development has been studios and one-bedroom units, predominantly in larger buildings, according to the San Francisco Planning Department. So, despite the creation of new housing, the majority of it isn’t built for families. As for the family-friendly housing that already exists — which includes dwellings of all kinds, from apartments to detached single-family homes — currently only 30 percent of units with three or more bedrooms are occupied by families with children.

Has S.F. gone to the dogs?

While we have solid data on kids, the data on dogs are harder to come by. Though owners are required to register dogs, very few do. Deb Campbell, spokeswoman for Animal Care and Control, says it estimates that fewer than 30 percent of dogs in the city are registered.

To calculate the number of dogs in San Francisco, Animal Care and Control relies on an estimate based on how many people live in San Francisco. The American Veterinary Medical Association puts out one such tool. It uses survey data and census data to measure the percentage of people who are likely to own a cat, dog, horse or bird. Every few years it updates the formula, and is currently working on that now, said Assistant Director Sharon Granskog.

However, such tools often rely heavily on national data. For instance, they estimate that about 1.5 percent of households in a community own horses, but there are probably not 13,408 horses in San Francisco. To get San Francisco dog estimates, Animal Care and Control uses several formulas to determine how many dogs are in the city.

And lucky for us, there are other researchers looking into pet data, too.

A Scarborough Research 2017 survey (a branch of Nielsen) found that while San Franciscans are certainly dog enthusiasts, they are less likely to own a dog than the average American. Tulsa, Oklahoma, may actually be the dog ownership capital of the United States.

Our Cat-Loving Neighbors to the North

Meanwhile, Seattle is in a similar situation — but with cats. The Emerald City has more households with cats than with children. It’s the only other city in the United States where less than 20 percent of households have children. Seattleites are 25 percent more likely to own a cat than the average American, according to the Scarborough Research survey.

The Pacific Northwest as a whole seems to be the cat’s meow, with Spokane, Seattle/Tacoma and Portland all in the top 10 metro areas with the highest cat ownership rates.

How Many Dogs Could You Fit on a Muni Train?

This isn’t a totally random question.

Bay Curious listener Rona Kremer rides Muni Metro almost every day, and she often finds herself pondering one of the signs on the train.

“[The sign] basically says that any number of service signal or guide dogs are allowed on the train free and unmuzzled,” Kremer says. For years, she has wondered about this sign: Why is it there? And how many dogs could you actually fit onto a train?

“There’s got to be some limit to how many dogs you could stuff the train full of,” she reasons.

The sign itself is there for two reasons. One, it’s the law. Both state and federal law prohibit public agencies from denying service or charging a person with a disability more to use their service, which means service animals must be allowed onto public transit.

So if all public transit agencies are covered by the same laws, why does only Muni have such a sign while BART and Caltrain don’t?

Representatives at the SFMTA can’t remember the specific incident that led the agency to put up the signs, but spokesman Paul Rose says it was likely the result of someone being told they couldn’t bring their service dog on board because there were already other service dogs on the bus.

“Muni likely wanted to make it clear that all service dogs were welcome by installing additional signage,” Rose says.

But what Kremer really wants to know is how many dogs we could fit inside a Muni train. She imagines it like a seven-layer dip of dogs.

There are two ways to do this math: by weight and by volume. A Muni train can hold up to 50,000 lbs. Luna is about 12 lbs. That gives us more than 4,160 Lunas.

To do it by volume, we have to imagine the seats have been taken out of the train and that Luna is a very flexible pup. With that in mind, the volume of a standard Muni train is 7,762.5 cubic feet. Luna is just a smidge over 1 cubic foot. This means we could fit 7,350 Lunas inside one train.

“That’s a solid number,” Kremer says. “I like that number.”

]]>PLUS: How many of those dogs could fit on a Muni train ... and other pressing canine questions.It's a dog show! We answer how many dogs could fit on a Muni train ... and other pressing canine questions.<br />
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Reported by Lisa Pickoff-White and Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED7910:01Spinning Rims, Spinning Cars: the History of the Oakland Sideshowhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/05/17/spinning-rims-spinning-cars-the-history-of-the-oakland-sideshow/
Thu, 17 May 2018 16:00:20 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11668394Sideshows have a bad reputation, but they are also a long-standing tradition in Oakland with deep ties to the hyphy movement.Cars swerving back and forth, spinning in circles; the sound of tires screeching against concrete; the smell of burnt rubber. The cheers of those standing on the sidelines.

It’s not NASCAR. It’s not “The Fast and the Furious.”

This is the sideshow. And it started in Oakland.

Bay Curious listener Shirley Yuen moved to Oakland six years ago and has seen sideshows only on the news.

“I had to do a Wikipedia search after the news just to see what this is about. Why are people taking their cars out and doing all these crazy stunts?” asks Shirley.

Now Shirley wants to know …

“What’s up with sideshows? Why are they in Oakland? And how did crime become associated with them?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpjIy3rvfX4

Sideshow Beginnings

The original sideshows were not dangerous or nefarious. They were pop-up parties — part car show, part block party.

They first bubbled up in mall parking lots of Deep East Oakland in the 1980s, says Sean Kennedy, a multimedia producer and local hip-hop historian.

“It seems like it started when hip-hop first got out here,” Kennedy says.

I meet him at the entrance to the Foods Co in Foothill Square. It’s so deep into East Oakland it is almost San Leandro. Kennedy says this is where it all began.

“There was a carnival that used to exist right here in Foothill Square, because there was a skating rink right here,” he says. “All the people would come down here to the skating rink and the carnival. They would bring their best cars and just cruise.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BiSRaXAnKGt/

Kennedy says that what many people think of as a sideshow these days, all doughnuts and destruction, was not the way it began. Back then, “no one did doughnuts or spun their cars.” It was just peacocking, showing off the cars that were the pride and joy of many — mostly male — residents. “That,” Kennedy says, “was the original sideshow of East Oakland.”

People had cruised around in their souped-up Chevys before, but it was as if the introduction of the new music taught the cars to dance.

As sideshows spread, Kennedy says, they became a sort of cultural marketplace. People repped parties, hawked homemade fashion lines and shared the latest beats and music.

It was always firmly rooted in a sense of place, Kennedy says. “It’s in the soil. For some reason the air here in East Oakland breeds that kind of creativity.”

The Sideshow as Cultural Marketplace

Yakpasua Zazaboi documented sideshows across East Oakland for his documentary series “Sydewayz.”

According to Zazaboi, sideshows were part craft fair, part improv performance, and always a place to catch the cultural zeitgeist. The sideshows, he says, were not just part of Oakland’s unique hyphy culture: They formed the space in which hyphy was born.

“You would come out and you would really understand what is popular in Oakland,” Zazaboi says. A key part of that was the music. “I think for about three or four years straight, we used to hear this song by a group called 3X Krazy.”

“It was just a baseline and it was so popular and would sound so good on really nice audio systems, it was almost like a sideshow theme,” Zazaboi says.

When asked to name his pick for the theme of the sideshows, Sean Kennedy says there is really only one: Richie Rich’s sideshow song.

“Now that’s a classic when it comes to explaining the sideshow, in the early days,” says Kennedy.

Music might have been the lifeblood of the sideshow but, according to Kennedy, the heart pumping that blood was the neighborhood’s deep-rooted car culture.

Car Culture and the Sideshow

Ruben Flores greets a customer whose car he has just modified at A-1 Spring Service.

This was — and still is — the go-to place to bring your car for modifications.

Flores, who went to Castlemont, the neighborhood high school, got the job straight out of school.

“The owner of the shop, he was losing a man, a mechanic, so he came down to the high school to ask about the auto shop program,” Flores says. He was hired on the spot, and has been here ever since. Now he owns the place.

“The first day of work became the longest day of work, 38 years later,” Flores says, laughing as he shakes his head. Those years have given him a passenger seat to car culture in Deep East Oakland. He confirms what Sean Kennedy told me — that in the beginning, it wasn’t about souping up cars to go fast.

“It was going lower,” Flores says. “Low and slow.” The best way to show off the beauty of your car.

Flores says his shop became known for fixing up cars in a signature style.

“What A-1 means, in the car culture, is the stance is higher in the front and lower in the back,” Flores says. “So they have that pointing-towards-the-moon type of look.”

Yakpasua Zazaboi says everyone knew about A-1.

“That was the place to go,” he says. “People would say, I have my car sitting A-1.’ It was because of the name of the shop.”

Over time the sideshows began to change. They went from low and slow to fast and loose, with drivers performing tricks with increasing levels of difficulty and danger. The Oakland Police Department began to take notice.

Sideshows Run Into the Law

Everyone has a story about when and how things got out of hand. Zazaboi says it was when guys with cheap cars started doing doughnuts to get attention.

Sean Kennedy says it was when the new built-for-speed Mustangs came on the market in the 1980s.

Maybe it was the death of a young girl during a police chase after a sideshow got busted in the mid-’90s.

Whatever the exact moment, the crackdown by Oakland police and the city were swift. New laws were introduced that criminalized sideshow spectators, you could be fined, even arrested, for just watching. Then came a 2005 ordinance, which allowed police to permanently confiscate any car directly involved in a sideshow. According to Zazaboi, that made it personal.

“Their car is an extension of their ego,” Zazaboi says of sideshow participants. “You take away their car, you kill their ego, and that is exactly what they did out here in Oakland.”

Sean Kennedy says that response complicated the already tense relationship between police and the community.

“Does that create an animosity to the police?” Kennedy asks. “It becomes a war at that point. And then it becomes a situation where the rebellion is, ‘We’re going to have sideshows anyway.’ ”

Both Kennedy and Zazaboi say that while local politicians criminalized the sideshow, local media demonized it, with story after story of violent, out-of-control youth taking over the streets.

Kennedy admits that bad stuff did go down, and there was by necessity a kind of nomadic, extra-legal element to the sideshows. People brought guns and sold drugs; sometimes fights broke out. And yes, young men acted stupid. But he says all that was just as likely to happen at a Raiders game.

Kennedy says despite all that, the sideshow did not breed criminal behavior.

“It’s not about a car show,” he says. “At that point, it’s about arresting black youth in Oakland.”

He says the sideshow made it easy to paint East Oakland youth into an already-made stereotype: “Young black kids who don’t have anything to do with their lives, out there playing around in these cars, carrying guns and selling drugs.”

Celebrating the Sideshow

What was lost in that narrative, Kennedy says, was the ingenuity of the sideshow: the mechanical skills it took to work on the cars, the driving skills it took to get them moving and dancing, the coordination to plan what are in essence the Bay Area’s first pop-up events. Long before pop-up events was even a term.

Kennedy acknowledges his perspective has changed with age. Now that he has a few years on him, he is a little more weary of making cars spin like whirling dervishes.

“As much as I love sideshows,” he says, “it’s a dangerous culture when it comes to spinning around a half-a-ton vehicle with no barriers and people standing there.”

That is why Kennedy, among others, supported a push to legalize sideshows that gained some ground in the late 2000s. The suggestion was to bring sideshows out of the shadows and turn them into neighborhood street parties. They could even make money, proponents argued.

But opponents, like City Councilman Larry Reid, who represents Deep East Oakland, countered that it was folly for the city to sanction an illegal activity.

Reid says the sideshows slowed down for a bit, but they seem to have picked up once again.

If you ask Yakpasua Zazaboi, he will say what is happening now is not even a real sideshow.

“I break it down like this now,” Zazaboi says. “This is how you know it’s a sideshow. If there are clean cars and women out there, you might have a sideshow. If it’s a bunch of buckets and a whole bunch of dudes clowning around looking at each other — you do not have sideshow.”

The definition of just what makes a sideshow is constantly in flux. Every generation has its own version, just like every sideshow has people who say it is either a criminal act or a space for the creation of culture. Maybe, just maybe, there is a little bit of both, hanging out at the sideshow.

]]>Sideshows have a bad reputation, but they are also a long-standing tradition in Oakland with deep ties to the hyphy movement.Sideshows have a bad reputation, but they also have a long tradition, East Oakland roots and deep ties to the hyphy movement.<br />
<br />
Reported by Sandhya Dirks. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED7810:33This S.F. Fortress Is Full of Money That Will Never Be Spenthttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/05/10/this-s-f-fortress-is-full-of-money-that-will-never-be-spent/
Thu, 10 May 2018 10:00:32 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11667314The prettiest pennies are made in San Francisco. Take a trip inside the S.F. Mint.The Transamerica Pyramid, the Ferry Building, the Palace of Fine Arts — these buildings are iconic San Francisco architecture. But there’s one imposing building you might have passed without taking much time to admire.

It’s a big, gray building sitting up on a hill behind the Safeway at Church and Market Streets. The building is surrounded by high fences, topped with barbed wire and cameras. Bay Curious listener Spencer Barton sees it on his way to work. “It has very small windows,” he says. “It definitely looks government.”

Spencer wants to know: What is that big gray building?

That Makes Cents

It’s a U.S. Mint.

There are six U.S. Mint facilities in the U.S., and each branch has its own role. The Washington, D.C. Mint is the Mint headquarters, the West Point Mint makes gold bullion coins, and the Fort Knox Mint has vast, heavily guarded gold reserves. The Denver and Philadelphia Mints make the circulation coins you’d find in your pocket. San Francisco used to make circulation coins, but not anymore.

Manufacturing Perfection

These days, the San Francisco Mint manufactures and packages commemorative coins and medals, as well as collector-quality clad and silver proof coins. Proof coins are the highest-quality coins made. They have a mirror finish and frosted details.

There are four main steps to creating this kind of coin:

Coining

Pre-cut metal discs, called blanks, arrive at the facility and go through inspection. The blanks that pass inspection are heated to 1500 °F to soften the metal, and are then washed and polished to give them a mirror finish.

Die Preparation

The stamps (called dies) used to press images onto the coins arrive unfinished from the Denver facility. The final product must have a mirror finish background, so the artwork is carefully protected before the dies are put into a polishing machine. Frosted details are laser-etched onto the image, and then the die is put into a machine that bonds a thin layer of chrome to strengthen the die.

The Pressroom

This is where the coins are actually stamped. The machines can be adjusted to apply the appropriate pressure to mint every coin denomination. A penny needs 54 metric tons of pressure, whereas larger coins can require up to 110 metric tons of pressure. Each coin is stamped one at a time.

Packaging

A series of 13 robotic arms and eyes inspect and package the coins. Human hands will not mar the gloss of these perfect coins.

Coin collectors, also known as numismatists, can purchase the coins on the U.S. Mint website.

Moving On Up

The big gray building on Market St. was not always the location of the San Francisco Mint. It’s actually the third location. The first building, called the Branch Mint, opened in 1854 in response to the California Gold Rush. The discovery of the Nevada Comstock Lode and a growing population increased demand on this Mint, and so a new one was constructed.

In 1874, the Mint moved into a larger building on Fifth Street in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. This location is now called the “Old Mint” or the “Granite Lady.”

When the 1906 earthquake struck, the Old Mint was the only financial institution to survive. It became integral to the reconstruction of the city.

In 1937 the Mint moved to its present location. It made circulating coins up until 1974, with a special run of Susan B. Anthony dollar coins produced between 1979 and 1981. If you dig through your change jar, you may be able to find some coins made in the city. They’ll have a small “S” mint mark on the front. Coins with a “D” were manufactured in Denver, and those with a “P” or no mint mark were manufactured in Philadelphia.

]]>The prettiest pennies are made in San Francisco. Take a trip inside the S.F. Mint.The prettiest pennies are made in San Francisco. Take a trip inside the S.F. Mint.<br />
<br />
Reported by Amanda Font. Editing by Jessica Placzek and Julia McEvoy. Hosted by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED7710:49Why Hasn’t the Tenderloin Gentrified Like the Rest of San Francisco?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/05/03/why-hasnt-the-tenderloin-gentrified-like-the-rest-of-san-francisco/
Thu, 03 May 2018 10:00:22 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11665527Tenderloin neighborhood residents wanted to preserve its affordability. But will they be forced out as improvements come to the neighborhood?San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood is located downtown, bordered by some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. Yet, it has a bad reputation. Tourists are told to avoid the area. You can often see drug dealing out in the open, and garbage on the streets.

“Growing up we always knew the Tenderloin’s kind of a more seedy place,” said this week’s question asker, Vy Nguyen. She’s lived in the Bay Area since she was a kid, but three years ago she moved to an apartment on the edge of the Tenderloin.

Since then, she’s gotten to know her new neighborhood. She loves the Vietnamese food, and she volunteers, serving the poor and homeless at St. Anthony’s. But she’s noticed one big thing: While the rest of San Francisco is getting fancier and more expensive, that isn’t really the case in the Tenderloin. There are a few new hip coffee shops and young people moving into the area, she said, but for the most part it hasn’t developed like the rest of the city. Nguyen wants to know why.

‘Why is the Tenderloin so resistant to gentrification when the rest of San Francisco isn’t?’

To answer the question, Nguyen and I took a tour of the Tenderloin with Pam Coates — a long-time resident who now leads Tenderloin Walking Tours.

While the borders of the Tenderloin are generally agreed upon, not everyone defines the neighborhood the same way. “It’s nebulous,” Coates said. “I mean the Hilton up there is in the Tenderloin, but it calls itself the Union Square Hilton.”

To understand the Tenderloin now, we first have to understand what it was like before.

How the Tenderloin of the past became the Tenderloin of today

When prospectors and immigrants came to San Francisco in the 1800s, they started to develop the Tenderloin and nearby Chinatown, because they were flat. “The rich guys went up the hill, like they do, you know,” Coates said.

The neighborhood quickly became known as an entertainment district — of both the legal and illegal kind.

During the Gold Rush, the Tenderloin was the spot to spend your money on a night out: at brothels, theaters, restaurants and hotels. After the earthquake in 1906, many of the modern hotels were rebuilt closer to Union Square, but for decades visitors still flocked to the Tenderloin’s speakeasies, jazz clubs, billiard halls and especially the gambling parlors.

“People came to the movie theaters in mid-Market, and then they ate dinner or went to the bars in the Tenderloin,” Shaw said.

But then, in the middle of the 20th century, the movie industry collapsed in San Francisco, gutting the mid-Market area. Famous recording studios closed. And in the late 1950s, the city started cracking down on the Tenderloin’s quasi-legal businesses.

“City Hall intentionally wrecked the Tenderloin. They eliminated our gambling operation, which they had to do. They changed our street configuration. They took away our cable cars,” Shaw said.

Without foot traffic or businesses, crime and drug dealing filled the void, and the Tenderloin became a pass-through neighborhood.

“Everything was geared to ‘how do we get people to Union Square, and we don’t care what happens between Union Square and the Civic Center,'” Shaw said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE6PpolDjvQ

A New Beginning

But many of the residents found a community in this ignored neighborhood. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Tenderloin was a haven for gay and lesbian San Franciscans. They supported each other and started to speak out to gain political recognition. The riot at Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966 started when a police officer attempted to arrest a drag queen — predating the Stonewall riots in Manhattan in 1969.

Many people who couldn’t find a home elsewhere found affordable housing in the Tenderloin’s old hotels that had long ago been repurposed.

“People started renting them out to low-income people, or people who needed a week’s rent, so they became sort of low-income housing,” Coates said.

For nine years, Coates lived in an SRO — a single-room occupancy residential hotel.

“It’s a room, usually with a shared bathroom, and little washbasin in it, and that’s it. No cooking facilities. You have to sort of make your own,” she said.

Today, these SROs define the neighborhood. They might not be the nicest places and can sometimes have health and safety risks, but they often offer a second chance for recovering addicts, domestic abuse survivors and people getting off the streets — people like Coates.

“I was on the street for 10 months. I’m a domestic violence survivor, but I had a good worker at the general assistance office, and I was a good worker. I got into the Tenderloin SRO, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic,” she said. “So that’s how I found peace. This neighborhood offers that. It’s new beginnings.”

That “new beginning” was what residents found themselves wanting to save — even if it had its problems. Tenderloin residents saw how redevelopment changed the Western Addition and Yerba Buena neighborhoods in the 1960s and ’70s and worried they would be next.

By the 1980s, they started to organize.

“The Tenderloin is really a model for how communities across the country can stop gentrification,” Shaw said.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Gentrification

What do we mean by “gentrification?”

While the word means a lot of things to a lot of people, for our purposes here, we’re focusing on the cost of housing and the residents’ ability to stay in their homes.

And in terms of housing, the Tenderloin is relatively affordable. According to the rental website Zumper, the median one-bedroom in the Tenderloin cost $2,345 to rent this past winter. The median price for the city overall was significantly more: $3,390.

A rent-controlled SRO can cost as little as $200 to 300 per month. (Though that would be a find.)

One-bedroom apartments, studios and SROs make up a large portion of the housing stock in the neighborhood. According to Shaw, there simply aren’t many single-family homes and fancier townhouses that would attract “the gentry.”

The Policies That Got Us Here

There are actually specific policy reasons the Tenderloin has remained relatively affordable and hasn’t gentrified to the same degree as the rest of the city.

Nonprofit land acquisition

“There was an aggressive nonprofit acquisition of land when land was still cheap,” Shaw said.

Today, nonprofits have held onto much of that property, and many of them run affordable housing programs — preserving that land at below-market rates.

Zoning policies to prevent high-rise building

Back when the Tenderloin residents organized in the early 1980s, one of the things they focused on was preventing luxury condos from coming in.

“In 1985, we rezoned the neighborhood to prevent any building over 13 stories, so someone could not pick up a piece of land and build a 35-story luxury condominium in the Tenderloin because the zoning prohibits it,” Shaw said. Non-residential uses above the second floor are also specifically regulated.

These limits make it unappealing for developers who have to weigh the costs of building with the potential for profit. While higher density could also lead to more affordable housing, residents considered the risk of luxury development to be more likely.

Protections for those SROs

The city also made it very hard to get rid of SROs and their tenants. The Tenderloin and nearby Chinatown have the most SROs of all the neighborhoods in San Francisco.

“So we now have all of this housing stock, which again is protected for low income,” Shaw said. “The gentry don’t want to move into a room without a kitchen or private bath, so SROs are pretty immune to gentrification.”

Historic protections

Much of the neighborhood is a historic district, and many of the buildings are protected. Many also predate the passage of the city’s rent-control ordinance, which comes with a number of its own protections.

“Their goal was to protect the neighborhood from the speculative real estate market,” said Jeff Buckley, the mayor’s senior adviser on housing policy. All of those policies add up and have made 25 to 29 percent of the housing units in the Tenderloin permanently affordable, he said.

Did It Work?

For the most part, there haven’t been as many people forced out of their homes compared to other parts of the city.

“We have seen, whether it’s the Ellis Act or the owner move-in or the no-fault evictions that have occurred at fairly high rates throughout San Francisco in the last 20 years, they have not happened in Tenderloin,” Buckley said.

Still, the Tenderloin has some long-standing problems. Last year, the Tenderloin had more violent crime than almost any other neighborhood in San Francisco — though it is dropping. And drug dealing is still common, especially on certain street corners. We certainly saw some while out in the neighborhood. In fact, when I was walking to meet Shaw, someone tried to sell me morphine.

Many of the residents are understandably unhappy about these issues and have been working to fix up their neighborhood, with a community benefit district and community programs.

“The first thing the business owners in the neighborhood wanted was clean streets, so they established a program called Clean City,” Coates said.

Coates’ historical walking tours are also part of the effort to show people what they’re missing in the Tenderloin. She’s seen signs of change: new murals, parks, clubs, and bars — where, if you’re lucky, you might see her sing.

“For me that’s great, because I perform at PianoFight. I perform at the museum and the jazz club and various other places around here,” she said. And she argues that once people come in, they come back again.

The city is working on improvement projects, too.

“We’ve attracted over 40 new businesses to the neighborhood, 15 arts organizations, 10 existing arts organizations being stabilized,” said Joaquin Torres, deputy director at the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development.

The city’s installing a bunch of new street lights, and Boeddeker Park, the neighborhood’s main park, was remodeled. There’s a new history museum and after-school programs. Three major housing projects are coming in on Market Street in the next few years. Fancier restaurants are opening too, like the Black Cat Jazz Club.

Of course, that all starts to sound like gentrification. Can the neighborhood get nicer parks, new businesses and more housing, without pricing out existing residents?

“Absolutely. I mean that’s the vision that we’re implementing right now. It’s an opportunity to have a truly mixed and diverse neighborhood,” Torres said.

Shaw hears people say it’s not possible to get rid of crime and keep the neighborhood affordable.

“I’ve had people say to me, ‘Well, the drug dealing keeps gentrification away.’ That should be the price of it,” he said. But Shaw disagrees. He doesn’t think the 31,000 residents who live there should have to pay that price.

So we end this Bay Curious answer with another question: Can the TL get nicer parks and safer streets without forcing out current residents?

]]>Tenderloin neighborhood residents wanted to preserve its affordability. But will they be forced out as improvements come to the neighborhood?Tenderloin residents wanted to preserve its affordability. But will they be forced out as improvements come to the neighborhood?<br />
<br />
Reported by Kelly O'Mara. Edited By Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED7610:57Does Anyone Play Polo at the Golden Gate Park Polo Field Anymore?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/04/26/does-anyone-play-polo-at-the-golden-gate-park-polo-field-anymore/
Thu, 26 Apr 2018 10:00:28 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11659844We go back in time to the days when polo was king at Golden Gate Park.The Golden Gate Park Polo Field in San Francisco is probably best known as the home to music festivals like Outside Lands.

Bay Curious listener Cliff Bargar has been to Outside Lands, and he likes to bike and run on the track around the Polo Field, but he’s never seen an actual polo match on the field.

“If polo was happening I would probably check it out at least once,” Cliff says.

Which raises the question: Is polo still played at the Polo Field?

‘Like the Coliseum in Rome’

The Stadium (as it was originally called) opened to the public in 1906, just after the massive earthquake and fire that ravaged the city.

“People probably needed some celebration after all of the calamitous things that had happened,” says Christopher Pollock, the historian-in-residence for the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department.

Pollock says it looks pretty much the same today as it did back then. It’s a big, grassy oval field a few hundred yards long with some bleachers on either side and a bike track around the perimeter.

There were big plans back then for what the Stadium would be.

“The grand vision was that this would become a stadium in the biggest imaginable sense like the Coliseum in Rome,” Pollock says.

The plan was for the Stadium to be a major site of the 1915 World’s Fair being held in San Francisco. The Stadium would be surrounded by bleachers with room for thousands of spectators. An arcade of arches would surround the field and grand portals would act as entrances to the field itself.

But the World’s Fair was relocated to the Marina District, and a lack of easy parking near the Stadium ended any chance of realizing that grand vision.

The Polo Field

Instead, polo became the Stadium’s main attraction. In 1931, it was designated an official municipal polo field, and, somewhere along the way, the name stuck. It became known as just “The Polo Field.”

For the next three decades, polo matches were a regular sight on the field, and the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department hosted matches nearly every week into the early 1960s.

But polo isn’t a cheap sport to play or to host. Horses are expensive to keep, and a polo field requires constant maintenance to repair the turf after horses have galloped all over it.

By the 1970s, rugby had replaced polo as the primary sport on the field.

“It died out gradually,” Pollock says of polo at the field. “It wasn’t one of these things that just dropped off all of a sudden. It happened over a very gradual amount of time as the sport really became less popular.”

There are still a couple of clubs in the North Bay and on the Peninsula where you can still find old-fashioned polo matches, but there’s nothing in San Francisco. The Polo Field is the only place that could realistically host a match, but outside of the rare tournament or charity event, it’s all concerts and recreational soccer games there now.

You don’t have to ride a horse to play polo

About five miles east of Golden Gate Park is Dolores Park, where bike polo matches happen almost every night of the week.

The rule book is 17 pages long, but the basics are pretty simple: Teams of three play against each other, and the first team to score five goals wins.

The game looks more like hockey than it does polo. For instance, in polo, players aren’t allowed to cut someone off who has the ball because it would be dangerous for both the rider and the horse. But that’s fair game in bike polo.

Bike polo has its origins in Ireland from the late 19th century, where it was played on a grass field. In 1908, it was featured as an exhibition sport in the London Olympics.

Hardcourt bike polo, like what’s played in Dolores Park, got its start in Seattle in the late 20th century and quickly spread from there. The Dolores Park court was built in 2015 specifically for sports like hardcourt bike polo.

So should we expect to see our question asker, Cliff Bargar, pedaling into a game any time soon?

“I find this a lot more interesting than horse polo, to be honest,” he said, “[but] I’m not sure yet if I’ll be back with my own bike … but I’ll definitely consider it.”

]]>We go back in time to the days when polo was king at Golden Gate Park.We go back in time to the days when polo was king at Golden Gate Park.<br />
<br />
Reported by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED6:54420 Started in the Bay Area. Meet the Guys Who Invented Ithttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/04/19/420-started-in-the-bay-area-meet-the-guys-who-invented-it/
Thu, 19 Apr 2018 10:00:49 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11663153It all began with a treasure map to secret weed plants abandoned somewhere in Point Reyes.You might call April 20 a Bay Area holiday. Every year on 4/20, at 4:20 p.m., thousands of marijuana users honor the drug, 420, with a celebratory smoke.

But where did the term “420” come from anyway?

Bay Curious listener Jess Lyons grew up in Marin County and always heard the code name had local roots. She asked Bay Curious: Did 420 originate in the Bay Area?

In short, the answer is yes.

The History

The story starts in 1971 with a group of five guys nicknamed the “Waldos.”

“We’re all good friends and we used to hang out on this wall at San Rafael High School on campus, and that’s why we’re called the Waldos,” says Dave Reddix, better known as Waldo Dave.

The Waldos were the jokesters of the school. They were always laughing, playing pranks, impersonating strangers and having a good time. And they got high … a lot.

“We were the guys under the high school grandstands during Friday night football games, smoking a doobie,” Reddix says.

But they weren’t the deadbeat stoners you might be imagining. The Waldos were a curious bunch, who would go on unofficial field trips after school. One time they trekked down to Silicon Valley to see groundbreaking hologram technology. On another trip, they ventured to an off-limits portion of the Golden Gate Bridge. They started calling these adventures “Waldo Safaris.”

One day the Waldos got a tip from a high school friend about some marijuana plants ripe for the picking. A few men in the Coast Guard, based out in Point Reyes, were growing the crop but had gotten spooked.

“They thought that their commanding officer was going to bust them,” says Steve Capper, or Waldo Steve. “They didn’t want to get busted. They decided, ‘We’re going to abandon this growing project.’ ”

The Coast Guardsmen drew a crude map guiding the way to the plants, and it ended up in the hands of the Waldos. Now the friends had a mission for their next Waldo Safari.

“It was a no-brainer. I mean, we’re 16 years old. We have no money. It’s free weed,” says Reddix.“We decided we’d meet at 4:20 p.m., on the campus of San Rafael High School, in front of the statue of Louis Pasteur.”

They got high, hopped into Waldo Steve’s 1966 Chevy Impala and drove out to Point Reyes to search for the crop.

On their first trip they didn’t find any plants. But they kept trying, again and again, for weeks.

“We would remind each other in the hallways all day long. We’d say ‘420 Louis.’ It was a private joke,” says Capper. “After a few weeks we dropped ‘Louis.’ ”

The Waldos eventually abandoned their hunt for the mythical marijuana patch. But the code 420 stuck around. It was useful. After all, smoking pot was a crime.

“We started using 420 as a code for weed,” says Reddix. “We could use it around our teachers, parents, cops, anybody. They didn’t know what it was. It was our own little secret code.”

For a while, 420 was just a Waldos thing, but soon other students at San Rafael High started to pick up on it.

Eventually it made its way to the Grateful Dead, who were rehearsing in San Rafael at the time. Reddix’s brother was managing Phil Lesh’s side bands, and another Waldo’s dad helped the band with real estate.

“We used to shoot baskets outside their rehearsal hall, because the doors would be open and they’d be practicing,” says Reddix. “We could listen to them playing music. It was awesome.”

Once the Dead started saying 420, it was here to stay.

Proving It

Finding the origin of a word or slang term can be a murky business, but the Waldos have the documentation to back up their story.

There are letters that reference 420, postmarked in the 1970s, which was before the term had widespread use. There’s an art project done by a friend of the Waldos that includes the word 420 next to a marijuana leaf. There’s the mention in the high school newspaper.

Last year the Oxford English Dictionary took a hard look at all this evidence, and now its online dictionary entry for “420” credits “students from San Rafael.”

]]>It all began with a treasure map to secret weed plants abandoned somewhere in Point Reyes.It all began with a treasure map to secret weed plants abandoned somewhere in Point Reyes.<br />
<br />
<br />
Reported by Olivia Allen-Price and Emmanuel Hapsis. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED748:38Have Ride-Hailing Apps Made Traffic Worse?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/04/12/have-ride-hailing-apps-made-traffic-worse/
Thu, 12 Apr 2018 10:00:06 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11657999Traffic is worse in the Bay Area. Are Lyft and Uber making it worse? Or could they be our salvation?Bay Curious Host Olivia Allen-Price sat down with KALW transportation reporter Eli Wirtschafter to see if our Bay Area traffic woes can be blamed on ride-hailing apps. The following is a lightly edited transcript.

OAP: Is traffic actually getting worse and could Lyft and Uber be to blame?

EW: Big question. First of all, we know for sure that traffic has gotten worse in the Bay Area. We live it, and we see it every day. But there’s a lot of other reasons why traffic has increased. The Bay Area is becoming a lot more dense. In the last couple years the economy has been doing really well so people are going to jobs, people are going out at night, a lot of people are moving around. Gas is cheaper than it used to be. So there’s various things that we would expect to increase traffic. But at the same time these two services that started in San Francisco, Uber and Lyft, have become really popular. And there’s a lot of reasons to think that they could be increasing traffic as well.

OAP: So how might Uber and Lyft be creating more traffic?

EW: Well, the first thing is the amount of time those cars are traveling without a passenger. So, when you drive your own car from one place to another, that’s just Point A to Point B. Lyft is going to take you from Point A to Point B and then is going to drive around waiting for someone else to join. So that looks like something that could add to miles traveled on the road.

OAP: Are there more cars on the road because of services like Uber and Lyft?

EW: Well, San Francisco was never a major taxi town. Even in 2012, before these services got big, taxis made up only around 1 percent of rides within San Francisco. Now a study by the county of San Francisco estimates 15 percent of trips inside the city are made through Uber and Lyft. That’s huge. That’s much bigger than taxis used to be.

OAP: How many Uber and Lyft cars are actually on our streets?

EW: According to data gathered by the county of San Francisco, on an average weekday there are more than 5,700 Uber or Lyft vehicles in San Francisco during peak hours. On Friday, that goes up to 6,500.

OAP: What kind of rides are Lyft and Uber replacing? Are people using public transit or their personal cars less?

EW: The impact on transit is pretty complicated. It seems from a couple of studies, if you’re talking about a shorter trip, people are now more likely to choose not to take the bus and choose to take an Uber or Lyft instead. For a longer trip, it may be that some people are choosing to take public transit more and take Uber and Lyft towards the end of the trip.

BART actually did a study of their own riders who use Uber and Lyft, and about the same number said it made them more likely to ride BART as the number who said it made them less likely to ride BART. But I think a more key thing to look at is whether Uber and Lyft are creating rides where before someone wouldn’t have done a ride at all. And we don’t have data on that for San Francisco. But a study based out of UC Davis found that 49 to 61 percent of ride-hailing trips would not have been made by a car at all.

OAP: Wow. So that would be a lot more cars on the road.

EW: That would be a lot more cars.

OAP: And is there a scenario in which Uber and Lyft actually help reduce traffic? Because I imagine you could get to a point where so many people are relying on these services that they wouldn’t have cars of their own, and that could be a good thing.

EW: Yes, it’s possible. You can imagine ways that they would reduce traffic. If people are circling for parking less and taking those services more, and they’re so efficient that they’re always picking somebody up, that could reduce traffic. If people are taking public transit more and using Uber and Lyft for just the last bit of the journey, that could reduce traffic. The biggest way they could potentially reduce traffic is if people start to use it more as a carpooling service. So both Uber and Lyft have a carpool version of the service. For now they’re not as popular, but both Uber and Lyft are saying they want to increase the number of rides that happen through carpooling. … But you still have to remember, if you take three people out of a bus and put them into an Uber, that’s still increasing the number of vehicles on the road.

OAP: And what can governments do? Can our cities actually help with this problem?

EW: A lot of transportation planners say if you really want to decrease traffic, the way to do that is to charge people for driving. So right now there’s some talk in San Francisco of imposing some sort of charge for cars entering the city. Another way to do that could be to charge for every mile that people drive and you could put that kind of tax specifically on Uber or Lyft. Right now individual cities don’t have the authority to do that. In California, authority to regulate these companies is held by the state, and they’re not making moves like that. They’re not under the same kind of pressure of traffic as San Francisco.

OAP: So is there any hope for our listeners who just want some traffic relief? Is there anything that they can look forward to?

Well, I hope they have lots of things they can look forward to, but for traffic relief they’re going to have to hold out for a world where people are carpooling more. There is a hopeful case for when driverless cars come along, our whole network is going to be so smart that people are going to be carpooling all the time and there aren’t going to be more cars on the road than there have to be. I’m worried that the reality is going to be the opposite. As driverless cars come in, it costs even less to have a car out on the road than it does now. I wish I had good news for listeners, but I don’t feel like I do.

]]>Traffic is worse in the Bay Area. Are Lyft and Uber making it worse? Or could they be our salvation?Traffic is worse in the Bay Area. Are Lyft and Uber making it worse? Or could they be our salvation?<br />
<br />
Reported by Eli Wirtschafter. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.<br />KQED6:31Oil Beneath San Mateo County? You Betchahttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/04/05/oil-beneath-san-mateo-county-you-betcha/
Thu, 05 Apr 2018 10:00:23 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11658023Bay Curious travels down the Peninsula and back in time to discover the history of oil drilling in San Mateo County.Oil. Since Americans first understood its capacity to make all kinds of machines run, they began to dig under the soil. Now, when you think of oil drilling in California, you probably think of Southern California and the Inland Empire. But did you know there are oil fields in the Bay Area?

Alden Hughes knows. The 15-year-old Prospect High School student from Saratoga is a hiker. So is his mom, and when she encountered an oil seep, he started digging around on the internet and was surprised to discover there’s both oil and oil drilling on the Peninsula. Which prompted him to ask Bay Curious: What’s the history behind oil drilling in San Mateo County?

Ancient Times, Rich in Organic Matter

The history begins a long time ago in the Miocene Epoch, a period that ran from about 23 million to about 5 million years ago.

During the Miocene, the Bay Area was underwater, part of the Pacific Ocean. (As Bay Curious has recently explained, the only creatures around at that time were either swimming or flying.)

Still, these waters were rich in planktonic algae, according to Rick Stanley, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who used to work in the oil business.

Stanley says these itty-bitty critters lived, died and drifted down to the sea bottom, where they mixed with mud. Over time, one layer of mud settled over another, piling up, “in some cases, thousands of feet thick.” Meanwhile, deep beneath the seafloor, “the heat from the interior of the earth caused the organic matter to undergo chemical reactions and actually convert into oil and gas,” Stanley explains.

While we don’t have video of the scene underwater, you can get a sense of the critters he’s talking about in this video by biological oceanographer Colleen Durkin of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories.

As every child learns in a California elementary school, the California coast is rife with seismic faultlines. Thanks to tectonic plates shifting about, layers of sediment and rock are bent and folded. Sometimes, when the layers buckle, you can get what geologists call an anticline. And oil is inclined (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) to rise to the top, despite the layers of impermeable materials above it.

So every now and then, hikers in the hills and beachgoers puttering about on the California coast will come upon a pool of black sticky stuff coming up out of the ground. They’re called oil seeps, and they hint at potentially deeper reserves of oil below.

Alden Hughes is interested in San Mateo County because that’s where he and his mom often hike. Sure enough, old place names hint at what lies beneath. There’s Oil Creek near Portola Redwoods State Park. There’s Tarwater Creek in Pescadero Creek Park. But most of the wells in the Bay Area have been capped and abandoned over the years. There are only two operating oil wells in San Mateo County, and they’re both located in the rolling green hills by Half Moon Bay.

The Gentleman Oil Driller of Half Moon Bay

We agree to meet on his pretty little farm for retired horses. The owner, John Tedesco, says he didn’t buy the land for the oil. He and his wife came here to retire, and it just so happened this property still had a couple of working pump units on it. “A very eccentric seller instructed me on the whole history of this, so I was very intrigued by it,” Tedesco says.

Before you ask: Yes, he does have the permits to pump for oil. “We’re totally regulated by everything, including Bay Area Air Quality Control,” Tedesco tells us almost as soon as we arrive.

We walk into the pasture, past the horses, to a fenced-in patch that’s home to a little pump unit painted green. When I say little, I say that because I’m from Southern California, home of the biggest urban oil field in the country, and those pumping units are several times the size of this one. This one is about 16 feet high when fully extended.

“This is a Lufkin, circa 1940s,” Tedesco says. One of the common nicknames is “grasshopper,” and like the name suggests, the unit does look like a grasshopper, with a head that moves up and down when it’s pumping.

If you were to put a rig in like this, what would it cost you? “$100,000, easily,” Tedesco says. Between both wells, he pumps about four to six barrels a month.

So is Tedesco getting rich off of this? Not exactly. He says it all depends on the price of crude on the open market — $150 a barrel, nice. $50, not so nice.

I ask Stanley why there aren’t more pump units like his grasshopper peppering the county, or the Bay Area, for that matter.

“Well, for one thing, the fields that have been discovered in the Bay Area are very small compared to the fields in Southern California,” Stanley says. “The total production here from Half Moon Bay Field is something like 60,000 barrels since the 1880s. Compare that with some of the big fields in Southern California. For example, Midway-Sunset, located west of Bakersfield. That one’s about 3 billion barrels that’s been produced, during that same period of time.”

But if Mother Nature didn’t deposit a lot of oil and gas under San Mateo County’s land mass, the story may be different offshore. According to the California Department of Conservation, more than 11 million barrels of oil were produced from offshore wells in California state waters in 2016. That’s not counting the oil production in federal waters more than three miles offshore.

“There is a report that you can get online,” Stanley says. “It was prepared roughly 20 years by what was then called the Minerals Management Service, now Ocean Energy Management. They predicted a billion barrels of oil might be found offshore of San Mateo County. But there’s only two wells drilled out there. They found geology favorable to the occurrence of oil, but they didn’t find any commercial deposits. So the billion barrels is an estimate. It’s really just a guess,” Stanley says.

Will oil companies find that guess is worth a fight with many of California’s coastal communities?

That is an open question.

]]>Bay Curious travels down the Peninsula and back in time to discover the history of oil drilling in San Mateo County.Bay Curious travels down the Peninsula and back in time to discover the history of oil drilling in San Mateo County.<br />
<br />
Reported by Rachael Myrow. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Ryan Levi, Erika Kelly and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED7:37How Worried Should You Be About Shark Attacks on the California Coast?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/03/29/how-worried-should-you-be-about-shark-attacks-on-the-california-coast/
Thu, 29 Mar 2018 10:00:29 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11657595Learn why our coastline is called the Red Triangle and how you can minimize the risk of an encounter with a great white shark.Michelle Terrell is a mother of five who moved from the East Coast to Mill Valley six years ago. Her kids wanted to learn how to surf when they got here, so she enrolled them in a surf camp.

“And I would say half-joking when they got back from surf camp, ‘I’m glad a shark didn’t eat you today,’ ” says Terrell.

And now she actually wants to know:

Do swimmers and surfers really have to be afraid of sharks when going out into the bay?

Shark Hangouts

You are not much at risk of a shark attack in the waters off California. You’re much more likely to win an Oscar, be born with 11 toes or get hit by a car than be bitten by a shark.

That said, the Pacific Ocean is home to loads of sharks. Including the shark we most fear — the great white shark.

Juvenile white sharks can be found mostly in Southern California and are far less dangerous than their fully grown counterparts.

“They are almost two different species,” says Salvador Jorgensen, a senior research scientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium.

As the white sharks get bigger, they head north to where they can find larger, fat-packed prey — seals. There’s a high concentration of elephant seals and other pinnipeds in a stretch of coastline between Northern and Central California. It starts in Bodega Bay, extends out to the Farallon Islands and ends around Monterey Bay.

“This is the area with the highest concentration of white sharks in the northeastern Pacific probably,” Jorgensen says.

This area is sometimes called the Red Triangle because, if you look on a map, it makes a triangle.

“Supposedly it refers to all the blood in the water,” says Jorgensen. He means seal blood.

But white sharks can often be found outside the red triangle. You can actually spot them all along the coast.

“Mendocino is also a major hot spot for white sharks,” says Francesco Ferretti, a marine ecologist at Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University.

But What Are My Chances, Really?

Jorgensen and Ferretti have researched the actual risk of shark attack in California.

They found that surfers have the most frequent shark encounters by raw numbers, followed by abalone divers, scuba divers and finally swimmers. However, if you control for the number of people doing these activities, abalone divers are most at risk.

“Abalone divers are most at risk with a 1 in 1.44 million chance of being attacked. Surfers have a 1 in 17 million chance of a shark attack. People going to the beach, just swimming, have a one in 700 million chance to have a shark bite,” says Ferretti.

Humans are not the preferred prey of sharks. Our stringy bodies are far less appetizing than a fat-packed seal, the chubby dumpling of the ocean. This might explain why sharks occasionally bite surfers, because from below, they kind of look like seals.

To mitigate shark attacks, the Hawaiian government culled over 4,500 sharks between 1959 and 1976. But according to the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, the program was ineffective in reducing the number of shark attacks. Now some experts believe that governments can make the ocean safer by protecting the shark’s food source and ecosystem.

“Sharks explore potential prey by biting it,” Ferretti says. “They bite otters as well. As they grow and learn about potential food sources, sometimes they make a mistake.”

To reduce your risk, you could surf outside the hot spots or avoid the water at certain times of year.

To help remember riskier months, some use the term “Sharktober.”

“That’s when white sharks are around the Bay Area,” says Jorgensen. “October, November is pretty much the peak, then that tapers off in January when the sharks are moving offshore.”

When they aren’t in the Red Triangle, our great white sharks swim in the waters around Hawaii, or in an area halfway between here and Hawaii called the White Shark Cafe.

“The White Shark Cafe is a really desolate part of the ocean. There’s not a lot going on when you look at it from space,” says Jorgensen.“In fact it was called the Desert of the Pacific by many oceanographers. I always think about it a little bit like Burning Man. We have got these Bay Area sharks out here in Central California and once a year they head off into the desert. God knows what they’re doing out there. But we’re trying to find out.”

Declining Risk

Between 1950 and 2013, there was an average of 1.37 white shark attacks per year, with an increasing trend from .9 attacks per year in the 1950s to 1.5 attacks per year in the last decade of the study. In that time there were 13 recorded shark fatalities in California and only one near the San Francisco Bay.

While the number of shark encounters in California has gone up, the risk has dropped about 90 percent between 1950 and 2013.

“We have an increasing population all around the world. If you put more people in the water you would expect more encounters with sharks,” says Jorgensen. “But what we’ve seen in California is that encounters and injuries inflicted by sharks have increased a little bit over the past 50 years but the number of people in the water has increased immensely, so that ratio has decreased.”

The reduced risk could be a sign of a declining shark population.

A number of “shark repellents” are now on the market. One wristband sends out electromagnetic signals meant to upset a shark’s electromagnetic sense. Another repellent uses “extract of dead shark” to freak out sharks with the smell of their own dead. Jorgensen says it’s hard to run scientific studies on these repellents’ efficacy. “It’s not super convincing, and in one case there was a controversy of whether that actually attracted the shark more or repelled it more,” he says.

“There are on average about 10 human fatalities per year worldwide. If you compare that to the number of sharks that have died at humans hands, that is more on the order of 50 to 100 million sharks per year,” says Jorgensen. “The equation is it’s very one-sided there.”

According to Ferretti, most sharks are killed through industrial fishing and the fin trade.

“They are dying on the high seas, and many are targeted for their fins,” Ferretti says, adding that sometimes a shark’s death is unintentional, “Blue sharks, silky sharks, hammerheads and thresher sharks, those are the species that can be caught as bycatch in large quantities.”

At Hopkins Marine Station, Ferretti works in a lab where researchers are developing innovative tools to combat illegal fishing in the high seas. They’re looking into creating tags that would detect illegal fishing, and drones that could patrol the waters.

The lab also studies movement patterns and the distribution of sharks throughout the ocean. They’ve been researching what shark populations looked like before industrial fishing killed millions. Lately they’ve also been looking at the importance of sharks in protected and thriving ecosystems.

“As apex predators, they help stabilize entire ecosystems. When sharks are thinned out at the top, animals further down the food chain can become overhunted,” says Ferretti. “For example, a scallop fishery in North Carolina was decimated due to a declining shark population.”

]]>Learn why our coastline is called the Red Triangle and how you can minimize the risk of an encounter with a great white shark.Learn why our coastline is called the Red Triangle and how you can minimize the risk of an encounter with a great white shark.<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED716:06Name That Team! How the Sharks and the Golden State Warriors Got Their Nameshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/03/22/name-that-team-how-the-sharks-and-the-golden-state-warriors-got-their-names/
Thu, 22 Mar 2018 10:00:52 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11656668Why are the Warriors the only team with a state nickname in their name? And how did we end up with the San Jose Sharks?What’s in a name? Or, more specifically, a sports team name?

This week, we’re answering questions from two Bay Curious listeners about how a couple of our Bay Area sports teams got their names.

Bay Curious listener Alan Chazaro is a lifelong Golden State Warriors basketball fan. He lives in the East Bay, and he’s always thought it was weird that even though the Warriors have played their home games in Oakland since the 1970s, they’re called the Golden State Warriors.

“I’ve always kind of taken it as an insult that they were never known as the Oakland Warriors,” Alan said. The Warriors are the only team in the NBA — and one of the few in all of U.S. professional sports — not to be named after a city or state. They’re not the Oakland Warriors or the California Warriors.

It dates back to 1971 when then-owner Franklin Mieuli planned on splitting the team’s home games between the Bay Area and San Diego. He thought the “California Warriors” sounded too much like the Cal Bears of UC Berkeley, so he went with Golden State.

When professional hockey came to San Jose in the early 1990s, one of the first orders of business was to find a name. Matt Levine was the franchise’s second-ever employee, and he was tasked with picking out a name.

After some internal brainstorming, Levine and his colleagues decided to hold a “name the team” sweepstakes. They put a simple ad in the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune and San Jose Mercury News, and were flooded with thousands of responses.

“There was a young man up in Vancouver B.C. who submitted 250 names, and he said one of these names has to be the one you’re going to select,” Levine said.

Eventually, they landed on Sharks. It was unique, exciting and would lend itself to a very cool logo.

Read the full story to see some of the zanier name suggestions and find out why the most-suggested name wasn’t selected.

]]>Why are the Warriors the only team with a state nickname in their name? And how did we end up with the San Jose Sharks?Why are the Warriors the only team with a state nickname in their name? And how did we end up with the San Jose Sharks?<br />
<br />
Reported by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED707:15How Oakland Became a Gnome-Man’s Landhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/03/15/how-oakland-became-a-gnome-mans-land/
Thu, 15 Mar 2018 10:00:53 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11655269There are thousands of gnomes nailed into the base of Oakland utility poles. Meet the man who painted them and learn why he did it.
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Amanda Font, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.Every time Bay Curious listener Lauren Bresnahan takes her dog for a walk, she sees them. At the base of utility poles all over her Lake Merritt neighborhood are a collection of painted gnomes.

“I started taking notes about where they were, but then it extended my walk way too long because I was having to stop every 50 feet,” says Lauren.

She came to Bay Curious because she wants to know more.

“What is the story behind the little gnome paintings all over Oakland telephone poles?”

The Artist

The artist has always worked anonymously, but after a few emails and phone calls I got him on the phone. We’ll call him Dan in this story.

He estimates that he has put up somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 gnomes all across Oakland.

“The original thought was, let’s just do my street,” he says. But soon the project grew.

The Beginning

It was 2012, and Dan was living on a hill above Lake Merritt in Oakland. He didn’t really have any painting experience, unless you count painting a house.

“To be candid with everybody … I am the worst painter in the world,” he says.

But his roommate liked to paint, and one day Dan thought he’d give it a shot and paint a gnome.

“Who doesn’t like gnomes? That’s something all of us can appreciate,” he says.

He painted one and then a few more, all on little wooden boards a few inches tall. When he finished, he thought, why not put them up?

Inspired by graffiti he’d seen in San Francisco, he walked outside and found places to post them: the utility poles on his block.

That was that. Or so he thought.

Soon the neighbors started noticing. From his window, Dan could hear them talking about the gnomes. Kids from the nearby school were enchanted by them.

“The kids had each individually claimed the gnomes as their own, giving the gnomes names, and telling their parents stories about them,” says Dan.

Dan was tickled and decided he wanted to spread the gnome magic beyond his street. So Dan painted more gnomes … many more gnomes.

He painted them in pretty much the same style — same beard, same hat, same belt. Then when he had a few paintings dried and finished, he’d wait for night to fall. Under the cover of darkness, he would take his dog for a walk. When he found a choice utility pole, he would kneel down and nail the gnome into place.

A passerby might think he was scooping up dog poop.

First Dan covered the whole Lake Merritt neighborhood. Then he went out into the rest of the city.

“I started doing Highlanders, and people in kilts, and things of that nature,” he says. “Just to add variety.”

Within a year, there were hundreds of gnomes across Oakland. A reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, Carolyn Jones, took notice and wrote a story about the gnomes.

The original gnomes have inspired copycats in Oakland. One imitator has painted characters that look similar to Snow White’s seven dwarves.

“Reading about the gnomes in the Chronicle got me excited,” says Dan.

But the article included a quote from a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spokesman, Jason King: “We’ll be dispatching a crew to remove them. … We can’t have anything that could compromise the integrity of our equipment. … The concern is that the gnomes could inspire additional people to place things on our property.”

Dan was horrified, and gnome fans were horrified, too. Hundreds joined a Facebook group in support of saving the Lake Merritt gnomes.

At the risk of being exposed and punished for his graffiti, Dan went to City Hall to see if he could convince the company to change its stance.

The meetings had a rocky start. The head of the linesmen at PG&E was clear: The gnomes could be a hazard and he wanted to know where to find each and every last one so he could have them taken down.

But the neighbors were a powerful voice, and an Oakland city councilwoman knew how much her constituents loved the gnomes. As the meeting continued, the PG&E representatives warmed to the gnomes.

“What happened in the end is PG&E was very supportive,” says Dan.

In a public statement, King said, “We received a great deal of public feedback, so we’re declaring the poles gnome-man’s land. We’re not going to remove them.”

Gnomes Today

The gnome diaspora now reaches from Oakland all the way to Oklahoma. Dan moved there a few years ago and says he has painted thousands of gnomes that live on telephone poles across the entire state.

“I think I spend about an hour, maybe two hours a week, on this project. And you know I’m not going to change society in any way, shape or form. But I can’t help wondering what our world would be like if everybody would just pick an hour a week to do whatever they wanted for the community,” he says.

]]>There are thousands of gnomes nailed into the base of Oakland utility poles. Meet the man who painted them and learn why he did it. - Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho,There are thousands of gnomes nailed into the base of Oakland utility poles. Meet the man who painted them there and learn why he did it.KQED697:45Why Are People Convinced This California Ghost Town Is Cursed?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/03/08/why-are-people-convinced-this-california-ghost-town-is-cursed/
Thu, 08 Mar 2018 11:00:36 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11654178Countless people who have stolen items from this deserted town have come to regret it.
Reported by Carly Severn. Edited by Victoria Mauleon. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.It’s hardly surprising that visitors to a remote ghost town like Bodie, California, would leave feeling … unsettled. What’s unusual is just how many of them are convinced the place is actually cursed.

For years, it has been said that removing anything — even a rock — from this eerily preserved Gold Rush town in the hills east of Yosemite will bring bad luck, health problems and even mysterious accidents upon a person.

The legend might be easier to dismiss if not for the sheer number of letters the Bodie State Historic Park receives every month from remorseful visitors. They’re writing not only to confess to taking something from the town, but also to return their “cursed” stolen items.

“Dear Bodie… I’m sorry that I took this piece of metal from the town. I thought it was all a joke but it wasn’t at all. Things are happening that are very hard to explain.”– From a letter to Bodie, 2003

Yet the most curious thing about the “Curse of Bodie” isn’t how deeply people believe in it — it’s how it began. This myth originated with a truly unlikely source, and it has had an effect they did not expect.

This week, the Bay Curious podcast takes you on a road trip to this one-of-a-kind place. Listen to the show using the audio player above, or read more over at The California Report, where this story first appeared.

]]>Countless people who have stolen items from this deserted town have come to regret it. - Reported by Carly Severn. Edited by Victoria Mauleon. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly,Countless people who have stolen items from this deserted town have come to regret it. <br />
<br />
Reported by Carly Severn. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED688:30America’s Emperor, San Francisco’s Treasure: Who Was Emperor Norton?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/03/01/americas-emperor-san-franciscos-treasure-who-was-emperor-norton/
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 11:00:34 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11652705Almost 140 years after his death, the beloved eccentric is still celebrated and revered in San Francisco. So who was he?If you’ve taken a walking tour of San Francisco, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the name Emperor Norton.

That was how Bay Curious listener and Oakland resident Jennifer Jacobs first learned about the beloved San Francisco eccentric after she moved to the Bay Area from Michigan in 1999.

“I was just like, ‘Wow, this is a whole other world. They have their own emperor here in San Francisco,’ ” Jennifer says.

Ever since, Jennifer has wanted to know more. Who was Emperor Norton? How was he seen in his own time? And why is he still remembered and revered today, almost 140 years after his death?

Not much is known about Emperor Norton’s early life, according to John Lumea, president of the Emperor’s Bridge Campaign, which focuses on researching Norton’s life and sharing it with the public.

Here’s what we do know.

The rise and fall of a Gold Rush businessman

Emperor Norton was born Joshua Abraham Norton in 1818 to Jewish parents in present-day London. At age 2, he moved with his parents to South Africa, where his dad set up a successful ship supplies business.

At 21, with help from his father, Norton opened his own ship supplies business, but it went bankrupt within 18 months. Things went from bad to worse over the next few years, and by 1848, both of Norton’s parents and two of his siblings had died.

The following year, Norton left South Africa, and after a short stop in South America, landed in San Francisco in late 1849.

Norton arrived in a lawless, Wild West version of San Francisco. The Gold Rush transformed a small town of a few hundred people to a bustling metropolis of 25,000 within a few years.

It was also a town of constant rebirth. People were making and losing their fortunes in the blink of an eye. The city was almost destroyed by fires seven times between 1849 and 1851.

Norton, who had already built and lost a business in South Africa, fit right into this boom-and-bust town. He established himself as a successful businessman selling commodities like rice and flour. He invested in real estate, erecting buildings on three of the four corners of Sansome and Jackson streets — one of the most popular intersections in town — plus plots in North Beach and a lucrative waterfront property.

“He made a great amount of money and was very influential,” Lumea says of Norton’s early days in the city. “He was in with all the right people, attended all the right clubs and all the right restaurants.”

Riding high, Norton planned his next business move. With a rice famine underway in China, Norton was presented with a chance to corner the rice market by buying up a shipload of Peruvian rice. Expecting rice prices to soar, Norton went in with a couple of business partners in 1852 and staked $25,000 on the venture.

And then it all went wrong.

“Within a [few] days, ship after ship after ship of rice comes in, and so the bottom falls out of the market,” Lumea says. “This idea, which at one point seemed so great, now isn’t so great.”

The deal, and the subsequent years of legal wrangling, ruined Norton. By the time Norton was 38, in 1856, he was bankrupt for the second time.

An imperial transformation

After his financial ruin, Norton went quiet for a few years. He moved out of his prestigious home, and fell out of favor with some members of the social elite.

He re-emerged on Sept. 17, 1859, on the pages on the San Francisco Evening Bulletin newspaper. Earlier in the day, he had walked into the paper’s offices and presented the editor with a short notice he asked to have published in that day’s edition.

“At the peremptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States,” the notice began.

At age 41, three years after losing everything, Norton christened himself Emperor of the United States. When France’s Napoleon III invaded Mexico in 1861, Norton added “Protector of Mexico” to his imperial title.

“I majored in psychology, so I couldn’t help thinking he must have had some kind of a nervous breakdown or something happened in those few years,” she says. “I was thinking schizophrenia or bipolar disorder maybe.”

There are no sure answers about Norton’s mental health before or after his imperial declaration, but some people think his money troubles led him into a deep depression and that becoming Emperor Norton was a coping mechanism.

“There’s a sense in which the persona of the Emperor actually saved him in a way,” Lumea says.

Later in his declaration, Norton called on representatives of all the states to assemble the following February to establish his empire and “to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union to ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring.”

Unsurprisingly, nobody showed up.

But that didn’t stop Norton. He had declared himself emperor. And he was going to act like it for the next 20 years.

Emperor of the United States, Protector of Mexico

Norton continued issuing imperial proclamations on items big, like calling for the end of presidential elections, and small, like chastising the skating rink operator who wouldn’t let him use a pair of skates.

Even though he was Emperor of the United States, his proclamations were often very local in nature. He didn’t hesitate to call out San Francisco’s police and elected officials. Perhaps his most well-known proclamations were the ones calling for the construction of a bridge connecting Oakland and San Francisco through Yerba Buena Island — what we recognize today as the Bay Bridge.

Norton also adopted an imperial wardrobe. He started with either a blue or gray military jacket, switching between the two early in his “reign” to maintain his neutrality in the ongoing Civil War.

After the war, he settled on a blue officer’s jacket furnished with large, fringed, golden shoulder epaulets. His balding head was almost always covered with a hat, most often a small military kepi or a garish beaver fur top hat with a cascade of colorful feathers pinned to the front.

Being emperor did not pay very well. Norton spent most of his reign subsisting off the generosity of the public and the support of a few wealthy friends from his high society days.

In 1870, with the newly-completed transcontinental railroad bringing more tourists to San Francisco from across the country, Norton helped fill his coffers by selling “imperial bonds” for 50 cents each.

He didn’t need much money. His lodgings on Commercial Street cost him only 50 cents a night, and he spent most of his day reading the newspapers, talking with other forty-niners in Portsmouth Square and writing proclamations at the Mechanics’ Institute Library on Post Street.

For lunch, Norton could go to almost any tavern in town and for the price of a drink, no more than 25 cents, get access to a full lunch spread of salmon, roast beef, tomatoes and more.

“He really makes himself part of the life of the city,” Lumea says. “He goes to political meetings. He goes to the theater. He goes to the saloons. He makes himself a public presence. He’s in the streets.”

The city’s newspapers saw Norton as a bit of a buffoon and regularly published fake proclamations with his name attached. So, in 1870, he started publishing his genuine proclamations almost exclusively in an African-American-owned and operated abolitionist weekly, The Pacific Appeal.

Many of Norton’s proclamations, especially those in The Pacific Appeal, were surprisingly progressive for his time.

“He’s talking about how African-Americans should have the right to attend public schools, ride public streetcars. How the Chinese should be able to have their testimony heard in court,” Lumea says. Norton also argued for the rights of Native Americans and against political corruption.

“So he’s really making himself into an early champion of the values of fairness and tolerance and the common good that really later become a great symbol of San Francisco,” Lumea says.

‘Le roi est mort’

Jan. 8, 1880, was a cold and rainy night in San Francisco. Norton left his room on Commercial Street to walk the few short blocks to a debate at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

On his way there, he collapsed on the street and died of a suspected stroke.

Ten thousand people came to Norton’s funeral. The headline of his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle read, “Le roi est mort.”

Norton died with just a few dollars in his pockets and would have been sent to a pauper’s grave, if not for the intercession of his old friends in business, who paid for a fancy rosewood coffin adorned with silver and a burial plot in the Masonic Cemetery.

“Even though often in the official world of journalism or politics he was somewhat seen as a figure of ridicule,” Lumea says, “to the people in the streets who saw him on a day-to-day basis for 20 years, he was known as a very kind person.”

Norton at 200

Almost 140 years after his death, Norton continues to captivate San Francisco.

Lumea started the Emperor’s Bridge Campaign in 2013 to try to get the Bay Bridge renamed for Emperor Norton, in recognition of him publishing the idea decades before it came to be. The Board of Supervisors designated February 2018 as “Emperor Norton Month,” and City Hall and Coit Tower were lit up gold on Feb. 4, 2018, in honor of Norton’s 200th birthday.

“Nobody really encompasses the spirit of San Francisco better than Emperor Norton,” says Joseph Amster, one of two men who walk the streets of San Francisco as official Emperor Norton impersonators.

Amster and his fellow Norton, Rick Saber, both showed up in full imperial regalia at Norton’s 200th birthday party in February at one of Norton’s favorite spots, the Mechanics’ Institute Library.

Guests came dressed in their 19th century finest, from Wild West leather chaps to Victorian dresses, to honor Norton. Kazuo Sayama came all the way from Japan to attend the party. He first learned about Norton decades ago while he was doing research for a book about San Francisco, and he was so enthralled by his story that he dedicated an entire book to just Norton and is working on a second.

“You have so many presidents,” Sayama says of the United States, “but no emperor in history. But people admire him as emperor.”

For many at the party and across the city, Norton represents the best of the Bay Area: an advocate of fairness and tolerance, a kind person and a bit of an oddball.

“He’s kind of a symbol of why this isn’t New York or why this isn’t Florida or why this isn’t Seattle,” says Tito Young, who came to the party dressed as a Wild West cowboy in brown leather chaps. “I think there’s something wonderfully eccentric about this gentleman, which I can very much identify with.”

“I’m glad there’s a strong personality in my family tree,” says Julie Driver, Norton’s great-great-great-great-niece. She lives in Ontario, Canada, and learned about her famous relative from her dad. “He found a way to make a name for himself after he lost his fortune, and I think that’s something that we should learn from.”

Bay Curious listener Jennifer Jacobs was blown away by the sustained love and attention the city continues to give Emperor Norton, and she can’t imagine it happening in any other city.

“San Francisco is a quirky town in a lot of ways,” she says, “and he kind of embodies that.”

]]>Almost 140 years after his death, the beloved eccentric is still celebrated and revered in San Francisco. So who was he?Almost 140 years after his death, the beloved eccentric is still celebrated and revered in San Francisco. So who was he?<br />
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Reported by Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED6712:22The Sculpture Wonderland That Once Delighted I-80 Drivershttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/02/22/the-sculpture-wonderland-that-once-delighted-i-80-drivers/
Thu, 22 Feb 2018 11:00:52 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11651369Anonymous artists once created sculptures made from driftwood and trash at the Emeryville Mudflats.Back in the day, Bay Curious listener Lisa Schwartz remembers seeing something odd in Emeryville. Nestled in the armpit of The Maze — across Interstate 80 from where IKEA is today — was a stretch of muddy tidal flat full of creatures.

There was a ramshackle warrior riding a horse into battle. Fifty feet away – a wooden dog playing an electric guitar. And when the sun was setting just right, the silhouette of a toothy sea monster emerged from the muck.

If you were a kid in the back seat of a car, driving by the Emeryville Mudflats was magic.

Our listener, Lisa Schwartz, wants to know: What happened to those sculptures? Or was it all a dream?

At the beginning of the 1960s the mudflats were a wasteland of space by the side of the freeway approaching the Bay Bridge.

“The Emeryville Crescent was in probably the loudest, most busiest spot in the whole area,” says Joey Enos, a sculptor and historian for the Emeryville Mudflats. “You have three or four major freeways meeting right there.”

Tons of driftwood, trash and debris would float into the area during tidal changes. To many it was an eyesore … but to a few artists, it was an opportunity.

After an initial ad hoc sculpture popped up (accounts differ as to who was responsible for the first installation, though Enos likes John McCracken for it), the Mudflats became a venue for anonymous public art. Contributors included professional artists, students, local factory workers and housewives.

People built hands rising from the mud, vikings, dragons, sphinxes, kangaroos, birds and trains. These forms were built with driftwood, foam, hubcaps, brooms, plastic jugs and buckets — basically, it was a lot of junk, nailed together to create something beautiful.

The lawless space for free expression lasted for about 30 years. Enos’ mother actually announced her pregnancy to his father by building a baby buggy sculpture at the Mudflats.

“It was really kicking in the ’70s,” Enos says of the Mudflats’ visiting sculptors. “Technically, they were trespassing, but no one bothered them. Emeryville loved it, because it made them look classy.”

It was not a static space. People would borrow pieces from one sculpture to build a new one. When activists heard about the sculpture garden, they used it to transmit political messages to passing cars.

“If you made anything political, it was asking for people to mess with it,” Enos says. “To either add to it, or flatten it, because they disagreed.”

This flattening and rebuilding process was called “editing” and it was actually shown in a deleted scene from the cult classic film, “Harold and Maude.” The titular couple are sitting along the freeway enjoying the sculptures and a sunset over the bay when two figures emerge and start attacking a sign that spells out F-U-C-K W-A-R. When they leave, all that is left is the word WAR.

Something else speaks to Enos about the Mudflats: It proved anybody could make public art, or augment it and make it their own. Even if academically trained artists got things started, ordinary people and folk artists were the ones who kept the space alive.

“I’m really into this idea that people showed up in California, and they had this beautiful Italianesque landscape around them and they were like, ‘You know what this needs? A giant artichoke! You know what this needs? A giant igloo in the desert!’ ” Enos says. “Making your own world, by any means necessary, is really interesting to me.”

On a recent visit, the only sculptures one could see were two horses made of buckets. That’s a far cry from the dozens and dozens of sculptures that once filled the area. So what happened?

Land along the waterfront in Emeryville was sold, and new Miami-style condos with floor-to-ceiling windows were built next to the mudflats. For the condo’s new residents, all that junk art spoiled the epic views they’d been promised.

Around the same time the sculptures started getting flattened at rapid rates.

“There were a lot of conspiracy theories,” says Enos. “Some people suspect the developers themselves were dismantling the sculptures, smashing them to bits or even setting some on fire.”

Environmentalists in the Bay Area also disapproved of the sculptures. The junk and the artists were disruptive to the area’s delicate ecosystem.

Then in 1989 came the Loma Prieta earthquake. The 6.9 magnitude earthquake damaged sections of Emeryville, including the highway that ran alongside the mudflats. A new highway was built that no longer had a clear view of the mudflats. With less of an audience, artists were further disincentivized to make work.

Finally came the cleanup. In 1998, Caltrans spent millions to cart away tons of garbage and driftwood by helicopter. Without access to free materials, the sculpture garden was finished.

]]>Anonymous artists once created sculptures made from driftwood and trash at the Emeryville Mudflats.Anonymous artists once created sculptures made from driftwood and trash at the Emeryville Mudflats. <br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek and Maddie Gobbo. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Erika Kelly, Ryan Levi and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED669:44Car Break-Ins Are Up in San Francisco. What’s Being Done?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/02/15/car-breaks-ins-are-up-in-san-francisco-whats-being-done/
Thu, 15 Feb 2018 11:00:48 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11643054The city saw more than 30,000 car break-ins last year -- nearly three times that of 2010.This story was updated on Feb. 21 to reflect an announcement from San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon.

If you park your car in San Francisco, there’s a decent chance you’ve been hit by the smash and dash.

San Francisco resident Elizabeth Heller had her car broken into a few years ago. She left her bag in the back seat and when she got back from dinner, it was gone.

“It shook me for a while. Someone stole my stuff. That’s not cool,” she says. “Every time you walk down the street, there’s glass on the ground, and it just seems like it’s so rampant.”

With so many reports of break-ins, our question asker Elizabeth Heller wants to know:

“What is being done? What steps is the city taking to combat this problem? Or is this just a reality that happens every day?”

The Inside Scoop

Most of the burglars breaking into cars are career criminals and work in organized groups the police call “crews.”

According to a 2016 civil grand jury report, these crews are made up of two to five people. They operate in their cars, and usually have paper license plates so they can’t be tracked down.

The report estimates that 70 to 80 percent of all car break-ins in San Francisco are done by these crews.

https://twitter.com/Willowese/status/912396177873690624

Sgt. Steven Spagnuolo works at Central Station in North Beach and spends a lot of his time chasing down car burglars. He has gotten to know how they operate.

“I’m looking for cars that we know have committed burglaries in the last couple weeks,” he says. “If we see one, we know they might not be up to no good.”

When he goes on patrol, he’s watching for people driving slowly, looking into cars with flashlights, or cars backed into spots so they can pull out faster.

He says the thieves usually take their loot to two big open-air markets where illegal deals are made. One is in the Mid-Market neighborhood at Seventh and Market streets. The other is in the Tenderloin, at Golden Gate Avenue and Leavenworth Street.

If someone is caught breaking into a car, it’s a felony. If they steal something worth more than $950, that’s a second felony. Each felony carries a maximum of three years in jail, but unless someone has been caught multiple times, chances are pretty low they’ll get that sentence.

When the burglars are caught, Spagnuolo says it’s not uncommon to see them right back on the street a short time later.

To crack down on these repeat offenders, the police use a strategy called “bundling,” where they track crimes someone commits over time. A case based on multiple incidents is more likely to result in a conviction.

Despite Spagnuolo’s efforts, the police barely make a dent in the numbers. An arrest is made in only 2 percent of the total break-ins reported.

Why The Rise?

There are a few theories about why this is such a problem in San Francisco right now.

1) Cars are packed close together, and it’s easy to break into one car after another.
2) We have a lot of tourists who leave stuff in their cars out of necessity, or because they aren’t aware of the break-in threat.
3) The things we leave in our cars have gotten more expensive over the years. Burglars once stole CD players — now they steal laptops.

Taking Action

On Feb. 21, District Attorney George Gascon announced he’s asking the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for $1 million to help curtail car break-ins. He also announced a website and telephone tip line to report car break-ins.

Gascon says he wants to re-start a program that would register private surveillance cameras that could then provide evidence to police.

Last summer, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott disbanded a citywide serial crimes unit dedicated to car break-ins. In its place, he unveiled a new plan to designate at least one officer focused on on break-ins at each of the 12 police stations in the city.

“I was happy because [serial crimes unit] wasn’t helping my neighborhoods that I serve,” says San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen. She argues the old unit focused on touristy areas around town, and wasn’t helping residential neighborhoods. “We need that focused attention at every district station.”

Right now, the police are rolling out the plan at Taraval Station in the Sunset District. In six months, the city will hold a hearing to evaluate if it’s working.

Fending for Yourself

If you really want to stop your car being broken into, maybe you should take a tip from a car burglar.

Cornelius, who asked that we not use his last name, broke into cars for more than 30 years. He started when he was 19 years old, and got hooked.

“I liked it. It was easy. I always had money in my pocket. And I didn’t have to work. It would take 15 minutes for the whole day,” he says.

Cornelius would throw the ceramic end of a spark plug at the middle of the car window to break it. Ceramic is denser than glass, so that’s why it breaks.

A lot of burglars nowadays use a rescue safety tool designed to break your window if you are trapped inside.

Back in the ’80s, Cornelius was making about $100 to $200 a night. Then, when he turned 27, he started stealing the whole car. He would make upward of $2,500 a night.

He was stealing cars to support his drug habit. He did it so often, and for so long, that he would get orders from the chop shops to steal certain cars. And he wasn’t operating just in the Bay Area.

“It can be from L.A. to Baja all the way up to Mount Lassen. Never, never out of the state,” he says.

Cornelius stopped stealing cars about four years ago. He says he “retired” from the business when he was caught selling drugs — twice in two days — and decided he was done being a criminal.

Now, he drives a car retrofitted to protect against other car thieves, and he has a few recommendations to share.

“You shouldn’t be leaving nothing inside of your car in the first place, especially if you care for it,” he says. “And if you protect your windows, your car is guaranteed not to get broken into.”

Cornelius listed three car alarm systems: the Avital, the Python and the Viper. He says they can alert your phone — so you’ll know immediately if someone has broken your window.

“Also, never put anything in your trunk if you’re going to walk away from it because somebody is watching you,” he says. “Just like you’re looking around, somebody is also looking around … and it might be me. And that’s a bad situation altogether.”

]]>The city saw more than 30,000 car break-ins last year -- nearly three times that of 2010.San Francisco saw more than 30,000 car break ins last year - three times that of 2010. We tag along with police as they try and catch one of these thieves, and learn about what the city is doing to curb the epidemic. <br />
<br />
Reported by Sarah Craig. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Julia McEvoy, Suzie Racho and Ryan Levi. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED6511:45San Francisco Was Once Aglow With Neonhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/02/08/san-francisco-was-once-aglow-with-neon/
Thu, 08 Feb 2018 11:00:15 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11638989The city was right up there with places like New York, Los Angeles and even Las Vegas. Market Street alone had hundreds of signs lighting up the night.San Francisco has some seriously iconic signs — like the grand marquee above the Castro Theatre, the impossible-to-miss martini outside the 500 Club or the Port of San Francisco sign glowing above the Ferry Building. These signs have one thing in common — they’re all neon.

It may be hard to imagine today, but San Francisco was once full of neon signs. The city was right up there with places like New York, Los Angeles and even Las Vegas when it came to neon. Market Street alone had hundreds of signs lighting up the night.

“Every commercial corridor was just studded with neon,” says art historian and neon aficionado Al Barna. “It’s just amazing the amount of neon that San Francisco had.”

“A lot of the signs were designed for pedestrian traffic, whereas in Los Angeles, they were designed to be seen from automobiles,” says Barna. “So there’s a little more intimacy.”

Within the San Francisco city limits, signs in each neighborhood had a distinct look.

“In the Mission, the signs are bigger,” Homan explains. “You have the Mission Theater, the Roxie and the 500 Club.”

Cow Hollow and the Marina district are on the opposite end of the spectrum, with small signs.

“They fit the scale of the neighborhood and buildings there,” Barna adds.

Lights Out

In the late 1960s, interest in neon began to dim.

“Neon came to be seen as blight,” Homan says.

Movies of the era used neon signs to highlight danger. It became associated with gangsters, crime, dodgy bars and strip clubs.

“You always think of the man standing by the window, desperate and alone, with the neon sign flashing in his face,” says Homan.

Not only was neon seen as the light source of seedy places, but it was also viewed as expensive and polluting.

It was in 1898 when British scientists William Ramsay and Morris Travers filled the first glass tubes with neon gas and lit it with a small electrode. Their invention would go on to give cities around the globe a special glow.

“But that’s far from the truth,” says neon artist Shawna Peterson. “If you properly dispose it, it’s not more toxic than other lights, such as fluorescent lamps.”

Peterson is one of the few remaining neon artists left in the Bay Area. In the past decade, she and her colleagues have had a hard time accessing the materials they need.

“We are buying up old shops that people put on eBay … their old glass stock and equipment. We’re turning into hoarders of neon,” she says. “Our local distributors, that we used to buy everything from, they’re not carrying neon anymore.”

This is even more frustrating to Peterson, as neon is slowing making a comeback and business is picking up.

“Everyone is reverting to a historical look, a vintage look. It’s very popular now, but there’s less of us doing it, and we’re all swamped,” she says.

The city has changed its tune on neon signs, too. The tenant facade improvement program that once gave businesses money to remove their neon signs now gives out grants to restore signs.

Market Street will probably never again look like it did in the 1950s and ’60s, but with more businesses opting to go neon, some of that old glow is returning to San Francisco.

]]>The city was right up there with places like New York, Los Angeles and even Las Vegas. Market Street alone had hundreds of signs lighting up the night.The city was right up there with places like New York, Los Angeles and even Las Vegas. Market Street alone had hundreds of signs lighting up the night.<br />
<br />
Reported by Serginho Roosblad. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED6:47Eucalyptus: How California’s Most Hated Tree Took Roothttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/02/01/eucalyptus-how-californias-most-hated-tree-took-root-2/
Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:00:45 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11644927Depending on whom you ask, eucalyptus trees are either an icon in California or a fire-prone scourge.Depending on whom you ask, eucalyptus trees are either an icon in California or a fire-prone scourge.

Bay Curious heard from two hikers wanting to know about the past and future of California’s eucalyptus trees.

“How did all of this eucalyptus get to the Bay Area?” asked Christian Wagner, a tech worker who lives in Pleasanton.

“I know that they’re invasive, so what do we do about that? Are they worth keeping around? Or do we need to get rid of them and replace them with something else?” wondered Julie Bergen, an occupational therapist from Alameda.

Reaching heights of more than 100 feet, the main kind of eucalyptus you’re likely to see here is Tasmanian blue gum, eucalyptus globulus. They feature sickle-shaped leaves hanging from high branches, and deciduous bark that is forever peeling from their shaggy trunks. Some people experience the smell of eucalyptus as medicinal; others say the trees just smell like California.

So how did eucalyptus trees get here?

During the Gold Rush, Australians were among the throngs flocking to a place where wood was in short supply.

The predominantly Australian eucalyptus genus includes more than 700 species, ranging from tall trees to shrubs. Hundreds have been tried out in California, but only red gum and blue gum reproduce on their own here.

“This was the era of wood power,” Farmer says. “Wood was used for almost everything. For energy, of course, but also for building every city, for moving things around, all the things where today we use concrete and plastic and steel.”

Besides the practical need to plant more trees, settlers who were used to dense forests also felt that the lack of trees in California’s grassy, marshy, scrubby landscape made it feel incomplete. So within a few years, nurseries in San Francisco were selling young eucalyptus grown from seed.

The trees grew remarkably quickly here, even in poor soil.

“In an average rainfall year here in California, these trees probably put on 4 to 6 feet in height and maybe, in their early growth years, a half-inch to an inch in diameter,” says Joe McBride, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of landscape architecture and environmental planning.

Beyond the drive to change the landscape and provide firewood, Californians also planted eucalyptus (mainly blue gum) to serve as windbreaks.

In fact, that was the original purpose of what’s now the largest, densest stand of blue gum eucalyptus in the world, on campus at Berkeley, says McBride. It was planted around 140 years ago to provide a windbreak for an old cinder running track — to keep its fine ashen gravel from blowing into athletes’ faces.

The trees’ success in California owed to a lack of enemies here. Because they were grown from seed, they hadn’t brought along any of the pests or pathogens (or koalas) they contend with back in Australia.

An early 20th century boom

Within a few decades of its arrival, many Californians grew disenchanted with eucalyptus. Blue gum proved terrible for woodworking — the wood often split and cracked, making it a poor choice for railroad ties. The trees also proved thirsty enough to drain nearby wells.

“If you go back to California farm journals of the 1870s, ’80s, ’90s, there’s just report after report of disappointment, like ‘these trees are no good,’ ” says Farmer, the historian.

But things changed in the early 20th century when U.S. Forest Service officials grew concerned about a looming timber famine. They feared forests in the eastern United States had been overexploited and wouldn’t grow back, and predicted the supply of hardwood would dwindle over the next 15 years.

Investors saw an opportunity: California had a tree capable of growing to full size within that time frame. If hardwood was about to be scarce, they reasoned, such trees could be in high demand and yield sizable returns within a few short years. (These people, Farmer says, were not reading blue gum’s lousy reviews in old farm reports. “And even if they did read them, maybe they wouldn’t care because they just wanted to make a buck; they were just flipping land.”)

This played out as a speculative frenzy — a bubble. Boosters began selling plantations dense with eucalyptus — hundreds of trees per acre. Farmer writes in his book that claims were made like: “Forests Grown While You Wait,” and “Absolute Security and Absolute Certainty.” In just a few years, millions of blue gums were planted from Southern California up to Mendocino.

The anticipated timber famine never came to pass. Forests further east proved more resilient than expected, and the need was offset by concrete, steel and imports, like mahogany. Ultimately, the thousands of acres of eucalyptus planted around California were not even worth cutting down. Much of what you see today is a century-old abandoned crop.

What’s fire got to do with it?

Eucalyptus trees have lovers and haters in California. A big part of the debate over whether the trees should be allowed to persist here traces back to the East Bay firestorm of 1991, which left 25 people dead and thousands homeless. Vast swaths of eucalyptus burned.

“People at the time, I don’t think, associated that with a planted plantation; it was just a eucalyptus forest,” says CalPoly botanist Jenn Yost. “And then when the fire came through — I mean that fire came through so fast and so hot and so many people lost their homes that it was a natural reaction to hate blue gums at that point.”

Because the trees shed so much bark, critics argue they worsen the fire hazard and should be cut down. Defenders point out California’s native plants also have a tendency to burn. Both say the science is on their side, but so far no landmark study has shut down the dispute.

That ongoing dispute is also politically entrenched. A few years ago, federal funding to cut down trees in the East Bay hills was rescinded, after protesters got naked and hugged the eucalyptus trees on campus at Cal.

Are they here to stay?

Blue gums can’t reproduce on their own just anywhere in California; Yost says they need year-round moisture. They’re able to regenerate in places like California’s coastal fog belt, but elsewhere “there are some plantations that don’t reproduce at all. When you go there, the trees are all in their rows, there’s few saplings anywhere to be seen, and those trees are just getting older.”

Not all non-native plants capable of reproducing on their own do it enough to have an ecological impact, Yost says.

“As soon as it starts outcompeting native species or fundamentally changing the environment so that native species can’t grow there, we would consider that an invasive species,” she says.

Blue gum is classified as a “moderate” invasive, putting it a tier below such uncharismatic weeds as yellow star-thistle and medusahead. McBride, the retired Berkeley professor, says “although there’s been marginal expansion of some eucalyptus stands, it’s really not well adapted for long-distance dispersal. It hasn’t really spread very much on its own.”

With an estimated 40,000 of eucalyptus planted across the state, the trees aren’t easy to get rid of. Slicing down a large blue gum near a building can require a crane, at an expense of thousands of dollars. And keeping them from resprouting can also be its own chore.

Long term, as the climate changes over the coming decades, it’s possible the aging eucalyptus groves that don’t get enough water to reproduce will begin to die.

Then again, if the state becomes hotter and drier, it may become the type of place where some Australian species are able to thrive.

]]>Depending on whom you ask, eucalyptus trees are either an icon in California or a fire-prone scourge.Depending who you ask, eucalyptus trees are either an icon in California or a fire-prone scourge.<br />
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Reported by Daniel Potter. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, David Weir, Craig Miller, Ryan Levi and Amanda Font. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED13:45The Beautiful Bay Bridge Frank Lloyd Wright Never Got to Buildhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/01/25/the-beautiful-bay-bridge-frank-lloyd-wright-never-got-to-build/
Thu, 25 Jan 2018 11:00:55 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11642644What would San Francisco Bay look like if Frank Lloyd Wright got to build the bridge he proposed in 1949?Did you know the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright wanted to build a bridge across the San Francisco Bay?

“It would have been brilliant, and I think it would have been very influential — and possibly changed the course of how other bridges subsequent to it would have been designed,” he says.

Frank Lloyd Wright loved the San Francisco Bay Area. But you wouldn’t know it, because there just aren’t a lot of his buildings around here.

“Seven or eight, depending on how you count them, including the houses,” says Paul Turner, a professor emeritus in architectural history at Stanford. He’s the author of “Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco,” a book that’s as much about the projects that didn’t get built as the ones that did.

“Frank Lloyd Wright actually designed close to 30 projects for the Bay Area, and they include some of his most unusual and really amazing buildings,” he says.

Why did Wright’s proposals fail to get the go-ahead? A lot of times he was just dreaming too big (read: expensive) for the client. But that didn’t stop him from dreaming big.

“For example, his first skyscraper was designed for Market Street in San Francisco,” Turner says. “If there were some project that he found interesting, he would do the design and just hope that it would get built.”

Wright never got the commission for a San Francisco skyscraper. Just as he never got a commission to design another Bay Bridge.

In the late 1940s, Wright was competing for projects all across the country. Jaroslav Joseph Polivka, a San Francisco Bay Area engineer and fan of Wright’s, suggested he throw his hat in the ring for the proposed second Bay Bridge.

That was in 1949, and Wright would spend the last decade of his life trying to win over decision-makers in California. Essentially, he fell in love with his own proposal, which he called the “Butterfly Bridge.”

“The structure had the form of a thorax and wings of a butterfly in reinforced concrete. It’s a beautiful sculptural form when you look at the drawings that he did of it,” Turner says.

The Butterfly Bridge would have started on the San Francisco end of the bridge, at the terminus of Army Street, now Cesar Chavez. Long, curved, concrete arms stretch across the water toward Oakland, carrying six lanes of traffic and two pedestrian walkways.

The literal centerpiece of the bridge: a hanging garden.

“People driving across the bridge could pull off into this landscape park and enjoy the views from high above over the bay. It’s kind of a crazy idea that traffic going across the bay could stop and there would be enough room for parking and everything, but that was the idea,” Turner says.

The idea doesn’t sound too crazy to me. After all, the Golden Gate Bridge is a tourist destination as well as a throughput for traffic. The proposal for the Butterfly Bridge was received enthusiastically by the San Francisco press. But the state Assembly Committee rejected the plan, influenced by consulting engineers dubious about the details.

“The engineers in Sacramento were able to say, ‘Well, it’s just not worked out in enough detail. We don’t think it’s going to work. It’s too radical,’ ” Turner says.

To be fair to the pencil pushers in the state Capitol, Turner adds we have to imagine how things looked back in the mid-20th century.

“The idea was so unusual, was so radical, it was unlike any earlier bridge that had been designed,” he says. “And because Wright had not gotten a commission to do it, wasn’t being paid anything, they weren’t able to design the bridge in the kind of detail that would really be required, with all of the structural analysis and everything. That would have to come later.”

Ultimately, they decided it wasn’t necessary because a few years later, people started talking about BART under the bay, and so that became the solution to this traffic problem.

Wright called that idea “suicidal,” which turns out to be an overstatement as the Transbay Tube is still going strong after more than 40 years.

In the end, Wright died, and with it, serious thoughts of doing something with his plans. Especially after the new, expanded San Mateo Bridge opened in 1967.

People still talk of building another bridge to span the bay. Just last December, Sen. Diane Feinstein and East Bay Rep. Mark DeSaulnier called for another bay bridge, a so-called “Southern Crossing” south of the Bay Bridge.

“Every now and then, people talk about an extra possible bridge and there’ll be stories in the newspapers. So it still captivates the imagination of the public because it is so beautiful,” Turner says, sighing.

So what does Duncan Keefe of San Jose think? Should we resurrect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Butterfly Bridge?

“As much as I would have liked to see this bridge have been built, it was for a different time. These days, if we’re going to make any investment, it ought to be in getting trains across the bay, not cars. We have enough cars already, and you know, throwing more cars across the bay is only going to make the traffic situation on the Peninsula and in San Francisco even worse,” Keefe says.

]]>What would San Francisco Bay look like if Frank Lloyd Wright got to build the bridge he proposed in 1949?What would the San Francisco Bay look like if Frank Lloyd Wright got to build the bridge he proposed in 1949?<br />
<br />
Reported by Rachael Myrow. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour and Ryan Levi. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED627:44Why a Tire Shop Built ‘The City’s Biggest Fortune Cookie’https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/01/18/why-a-tire-shop-built-the-citys-biggest-fortune-cookie/
Thu, 18 Jan 2018 11:00:01 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11642230This sign in front of the tire shop was built in 1958, and it has displayed nothing but quotes ever since.In the heart of the Tenderloin, in the parking lot of a tire shop, stands a roughly 7-foot sign atop two poles about two stories high. You might expect to see advertising for deals on tires or auto services on the sign. Instead, you’ll find inspirational quotes, truisms and sayings. And it’s been like that for more than 50 years.

San Francisco columnist Herb Caen once called the sign at the corner of Turk and Larkin “the city’s biggest fortune cookie.”

This sign also piqued the interest of Bay Curious listener John Angelico of San Francisco.

“For a tire shop to have this huge marquee out front giving us something totally unrelated to the sale of tires and auto services … It’s kind of a very San Franciscan thing,” says Angelico.

He wanted to know:

“When did the sign get started? Who is responsible for the sign’s content, and what kind of reaction have they had over the years from the sign?”

A Message From Above

The story begins with Hugh Keville, co-founder of the tire shop, Kahn and Keville.

“He was a gentleman, very kind, extremely dignified. Very solicitous of other people and, you know, just a very old-fashioned guy,” says Bill Brinnon, the office manager.

After opening the first tire shop in 1912 on Golden Gate Avenue, Keville served in World War I. While at war, he carried a small notebook for collecting quotes.

“I wrote them down to help carry me through,” Keville reportedly once said.

According to Brinnon, Keville saw some gruesome battles.

“Most of his patrol were wiped out and in kind of gory and bloody fashion right in front of him,” Brinnon says. “He was a young man at the time and it had a big effect on him.”

After returning from war, Keville started writing the quotes he’d collected on a small blackboard inside the tire shop, next to the cashier’s window. Customers and friends liked them enough that it became a tradition. Soon he was putting up new quotes each week, and he continued the tradition even after Kahn and Keville opened a new tire shop on Turk and Larkin streets in 1934.

One day, a customer suggested to Keville that he move the quotes outside so more people could see them.

And boy, did he.

In 1958, Keville had the giant sign installed in the parking lot. Its sole purpose was for presenting quotes.

The Sign Today

Keville is no longer around, and he passed the sign duty on to Bill Brinnon in the 1970s.

Brinnon was the perfect fit for such an important task. He has loved language for a long time. In college he studied English and architecture. After graduation he worked in a bookstore and then a publishing company.

These days the sign changes roughly every four to six weeks. They come from what Brinnon is reading, “and then of course employees can bring things in, and everybody knows we do it, so they’ll say, ‘Oh, here’s a good one, you’ll like it,’ ” says Brinnon.

A lot of the feedback they receive are calls from bus riders, who pass the sign on their daily routes.

Brinnon tells me he prefers truisms, humor and quotes that play with language, though some believe the quotes have a political bent.

“I had a little encounter last night with a passer-by and he had all kinds of ideas about what we put up there. And he thought we were too political and I don’t feel we are. So I went back and checked the records, and the quote we put out had nothing to do with politics,” says Brinnon.

Recently, the sign displayed a quote by Voltaire saying, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Though Brinnon admits he’s concerned about the state of the nation, he says he does his best to keep his politics off the sign.

“I think there are some real problems and dangers facing us. Because it’s a government based on impulse. … It’s not what we’re used to, but the corner sign is what we’re used to. We don’t change too much around here,” he says.

But it could change. This store was once one of many tire shops that made up Tire Row. All the other shops have shuttered, and tech giants like Uber and Twitter have moved nearby. Brinnon knows that this tire shop may not be around much longer.

“As far as the industry itself — the idea of an old stand-alone tire store where they sell nothing but tires is probably a thing of the past,” he says.

The Selection Process

I visited Brinnon two months ago, to see how the quotes get selected.
When I arrived, Brinnon had narrowed it down to four options:

“WE DON’T KNOW WHAT WE WANT, BUT WE ARE READY TO BITE SOMEBODY TO GET IT.” – WILL ROGERS.

“I CAN SEE NOT EVERYONE HAS A SEAT AT THE TABLE, IT’S TIME TO BUILD A BIGGER TABLE.” – RANDY BRYCE IRONWORKER.

“IT’S NEVER ENTIRELY HEARTENING TO LEARN THAT FASCISTS ARE ALWAYS INCOMPETENT.”

“BUILD A WALL ON THE INTERNET AND MAKE RUSSIA PAY FOR IT.”

Next, Brinnon writes them out on a piece of paper the way they’d look on the board and shows them to various employees in the shop.

He talks to tire technicians, office workers and the general manager.

The one that got everyone talking was the quote about Russia.

“They meddled in the election, Russia did, and took my vote away!” says Ron Dhein, the general manager.

A week later, that quote was on the sign.

]]>This sign in front of the tire shop was built in 1958, and it has displayed nothing but quotes ever since.This sign in front of the tire shop was built in 1958, and it has displayed nothing but quotes ever since. <br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED8:30How the San Francisco School Lottery Works, And How It Doesn’thttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/01/11/how-the-san-francisco-school-lottery-works-and-how-it-doesnt-2/
Thu, 11 Jan 2018 11:00:28 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11641238San Francisco's complicated school lottery system offers opportunity that isn't always realized.Update: On Sept. 25, 2018, three school board members brought forward a resolution calling for the end of the current student assignment system.

aurel Gaddie and Lamont Lucas try to conduct life as locally as possible. They live in San Francisco’s Duboce Triangle and don’t own a car. They shop locally and walk, bike or ride public transportation when they need to get around. So when it came to finding a kindergarten for their son, Kelvin, local was a priority.

“Proximity was the most important thing and diversity was a close second,” Gaddie said. “We wanted our kids to meet kids from different communities. And third, we were hoping for a Spanish-immersion program.”

The schools that fit those criteria weren’t the most popular ones in San Francisco, so Gaddie felt pretty confident that she’d get something she wanted. But, to make sure, she took some advice about how to list her choices.

By The Numbers

We analyzed 2017-2018 kindergarten assignment data to see how common parental tactics play out. See what we found.

“We read a lot on the internet about how to game the system, this famous San Francisco lottery system,” Gaddie said. “And we kind of crafted our first lottery list around that. We listed 17 different schools, only a handful of which we really wanted.”

The first-round assignment offers came out in March. “We were shocked to find we were assigned to something that was not on our list and not in our neighborhood,” Gaddie said.

This is the nightmare of many San Francisco families looking to enroll their children in public school. For many, San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) student assignment system — called the lottery by many — is a mixture of overwhelming, stressful and baffling.

In many places around the country, where a child lives determines where he or she goes to school. San Francisco doesn’t do that because of segregated housing patterns. Creating diverse schools is a district goal.

“Your opportunity to go to a school shouldn’t be determined by your home address, just like your opportunity to go to a library or a public park shouldn’t be determined by your home address,” said Orla O’Keeffe, chief of policy and operations for SFUSD.

The lottery as we know it today is the product of more than 40 years of trying to solve the problem of segregated schools. In the 1970s, SFUSD tried bussing kids from one neighborhood to another, but parents hated that and many left the district altogether. Next the district tried a combination of parental choice and racial quotas, trying to find a balance between the autonomy parents craved and integration. But race-based admissions were challenged in court and the district had to drop the quota system altogether.

The current lottery system tries to balance parental choice with the district’s goals of integrated schools. It puts the onus of researching and visiting schools on parents, who then list their choices and submit an application to the district office in person. The district prepares student files and puts them into an algorithm programmed to give priority to a few select groups.

How it works

The algorithm randomly selects a school and then looks at all the students who listed that school as a choice anywhere on their list and puts them in a pool together. The computer then fills the available spots at the school based on tiebreakers. The tiebreakers are:

Sibling preference — if the student already has a sibling at the school.

This same process happens for every school until the only schools with open spots are ones that none of the remaining unassigned children listed. At this point in the process, some kids might have been tentatively assigned to more than one school because they had strong tiebreakers. This is when the algorithm takes into account where a school was ranked on the student’s list. It drops the child from every school except the highest-ranked choice. Now there are open spots again, which the algorithm fills from the group of kids who have not been assigned any school yet.

At this point, the district built in something called a “swapping mechanism” on the advice of some economists who said it would help prevent parents from trying to “game the system.” During the swapping phase, the algorithm sees if there are any two children who could both be happier if they trade their spots. The district says the swapping mechanism affected 10 percent of Round 1 kindergarten offers in the 2017-18 school year.

After all that, there are still some unlucky kids who haven’t been assigned to a school. They didn’t get any of their choices, so the district places them in a school with open spots based on proximity to their home address.

The district sends the first-round assignments in March, at which point parents can either decide to enroll in the school they received or enter the second round of the lottery. People who miss the deadline can also enter in the second round, but the number of options is smaller because some portion of families took their first-round offer.

If parents still don’t get a school they are happy with after the second round, they can put their child on the waitlist for one school, in case a child enrolled there leaves. Some kids do get into their first-choice school at the last minute this way. If a child receives an offer off the waitlist, she has to take it, even if she’s already happy at a different school.

How do parents feel about it?

Some parents feel this lottery system is overly complicated and stressful to families, but for others, CTIP is the only way that their children can access better schools. Raquel Knighten lives in the Bayview, but sends her kids to Rooftop, a highly coveted school on Twin Peaks. Her two kids ride a school bus to get there every day.

Knighten wishes the schools in her neighborhood were better, so that she didn’t feel forced to send her kids far away. She’d like the luxury other parents seem to have, choosing schools based on language programs or a focus on the arts. She’s just glad her kids aren’t going to an underperforming school.

“There’s a lot of anxiety, but I think overall, it’s a much better feeling than, ‘Your child has to go to this school.’ And you have no options,” Knighten said. She’s frustrated with parents who complain about the lottery without considering what that choice means to other families.

“I think a lot of parents are selfish,” Knighten said. “They only think about things and worry about stuff when it applies to their children. And they don’t care how it affects other people’s children. I think overall as parents we should be concerned about every child getting an adequate education because every generation goes to the future.”

She’s glad the school district makes an effort to prioritize diversity at its schools.

“I just think we have to teach each other to be more accepting, and you can’t do that if you’re not around people who don’t look like you,” she said.

Knighten chose Rooftop because she had heard from other parents that it was one of the best schools in the city. But parents are making very individual choices about where to send their kids based on geography, work schedules, after-school programming, start times, language programs and more.

Heather Dobbins missed the first-round deadline when her son, Keegan, was applying to kindergarten. Keegan was assigned a school Dobbins didn’t want, so she put him in private school. That didn’t work out and Dobbins ended up home-schooling her son for several months. She entered the public school lottery again for first grade and got the same school — Cobb Elementary. This time she gave it a chance and her son loves it.

“Now we know, look for the schools that have what you need, rather than the top 10 schools on everybody’s list,” Dobbins. She admits in her initial kindergarten search she was close-minded about what a “good” school looks like, but her experience at Cobb has taught her that lots of schools can offer a good fit. But she hasn’t changed her mind about one thing — she still hates the lottery system.

“It’s a burden on every parent, and I’m amazed that more kids don’t go unenrolled,” Dobbins said.

Other parents had a variety of opinions about the lottery. Some didn’t think it was that big a deal — just turn the forms in on time. Others, similar to Raquel Knighten, know that where they live gives them a preference in the lottery, and were weighing choices carefully.

Mink Lincoln-Price has been very worried about how her African-American sons will fare in school. She’s watches the news and sees the reports about how schools are failing black boys. When she visits schools, she’s looking to make sure the leadership understands that this achievement gap is a problem. She wants to hear that principals are actively addressing implicit bias on campus.

“For me it’s really about the academics,” Lincoln-Price said. “Of course I would like them to go to a school where they could have friends that look like them, but of course you can make friends with anybody. Because honestly if they do go to a school with a majority of the kids that look like them, most likely there won’t be any money at that school.”

Sadly, she’s right. All schools get state funding based on the number of students enrolled, so schools with fewer students get less money. Of course, it’s not as simple as that. California’s funding formula portions out more money for schools that serve low-income children, English language learners, and foster kids. But at schools with wealthier parents, it’s not uncommon for the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the school.

Is the lottery making schools more diverse?

Despite the district’s attempt to give families living in parts of the city with low test scores a preference in the school lottery, parents’ choices seem to be patterned. That could be due to the logistics of getting a child to school, but it also could be a sign some parents lack information about the various options around the city. The district makes an attempt to reach out widely with information and nonprofit groups do as well, but often parents get information from one another.

Bilingual and Spanish-immersion programs often draw Latino families who want to be able to help their kids with homework and be able to confer with the teacher. Many parents want a school that’s close to home in case there are emergencies. And few elementary school parents are eager to put their 5-year-olds on Muni buses to attend school across town. The district runs several buses on routes designed to give students more access, but seats are limited.

KQED’s analysis of 2017-2018 kindergarten assignment data shows that almost 60 percent of students attend a school out of their ZIP code — so there’s a lot of moving around. But those numbers varied greatly by geography. For example, 75 percent of kids living in the Outer Richmond stayed there for school, while 87 percent of kids in the Bayview left their ZIP code. And even when students leave their ZIP code, they may not be going far.

“They’re not all going across town,” said O’Keeffe. “In many cases it’s just kind of the next few neighborhoods that they’re going to school to, like the Excelsior, or Vis Valley, the Mission, stuff like that.”

Ultimately, although San Francisco’s choice system does give some kids a way out of their neighborhoods, it isn’t doing a great job of desegregating the district’s schools overall. Choice patterns are just as segregated as housing patterns.

“Choice is complex and it is time-consuming and it does create angst and it’s not currently creating diversity,” O’Keeffe said. “I do think, though, that student assignment alone will never solve for this.”

Still, she says the district is committed to trying. The school board is considering a number of changes to the student assignment process, including doing away with the swapping mechanism.

“We’re concerned that it’s complicated and difficult to understand and that it encourages families to list schools they don’t want as a strategy to get a choice,” O’Keeffe said.

A choice system like this one benefits parents who have the time and wherewithal to seek out information, and the ability to have their children attend the schools they like, even if it’s a difficult commute. O’Keeffe knows this, but says there’s no easy solution.

“If you’ve got choice patterns that are racially isolated, how can choice solve it? And if you’ve got residential patterns that are racially isolated, how can neighborhoods solve it?” she asked.

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]]>San Francisco's complicated school lottery system offers opportunity that isn't always realized.San Francisco's complicated school lottery system offers opportunity that isn't always realized.<br />
<br />
Reported by Katrina Schwartz. Bay Curious is made by Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Ryan Levi, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, and Julia McEvoy. Holly Kernan is Vice President for News. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED6011:34How Joseph Eichler Introduced Stylish Housing for the Masseshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2018/01/04/how-joseph-eichler-introduced-stylish-housing-for-the-masses-2/
Thu, 04 Jan 2018 11:00:29 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11639998Between 1949 and 1974, when the developer died, his group built roughly 11,000 homes in California, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Reported by Rachael Myrow. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.Suburbia: The very word conjures up rows and rows of cookie-cutter houses, laid out on a vast, grim grid of blah. At the time they were built, after World War II, the nation was desperate for new housing. But some of those homes are considered architectural treasures today, especially if they were made by one particular Silicon Valley real estate developer — Joseph Eichler.

Learn about Joseph Eichler and his tract houses in this week’s Bay Curious episode using the player above. Read a text version here.

]]>Between 1949 and 1974, when the developer died, his group built roughly 11,000 homes in California, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. - Reported by Rachael Myrow. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho,Between 1949 and 1974, when the developer died, his group built roughly 11,000 homes in California, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area.<br />
<br />KQED7:53Everything You Want to Know About Legal Weed in Californiahttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/12/21/everything-you-want-to-know-about-legal-weed-in-california-2/
Thu, 21 Dec 2017 08:01:36 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11638056Bay Curious answers your questions about legal weed in California.On Jan. 1, it will become legal for adults 21 and older to buy and sell recreational marijuana in California. In anticipation, Bay Curious is answering a bunch of your questions about commercially available marijuana.

Where will I be able to buy recreational marijuana on Jan. 1?

Proposition 64, the ballot initiative that legalized recreational marijuana in 2016, gave cities and counties the power to decide whether adult-use marijuana could be available in their areas. A number of municipalities have banned recreational sales. For those who have approved it, they still need to work out their own regulations and licensing processes — meaning that some places won’t be ready to roll out right away.

Here’s what you can expect in the state’s 10 biggest cities:

Green light:

San Jose: 16 currently registered medical dispensaries will be allowed to sell recreationally on Jan. 1.

Oakland: Any of the city’s licensed medical dispensaries will be able to sell recreationally on Jan. 1 with the proper state license.

San Diego: 15 existing medical dispensaries and two new businesses are approved to sell recreationally on Jan. 1 with the proper state license.

Sacramento: Any of the 30 existing medical dispensaries that complete permitting requirements will be able to sell recreationally on Jan. 1.

Yellow light:

San Francisco: Businesses with necessary licenses can start operating on Jan. 6.

Santa Rosa: The City Council passed final regulations this week, and businesses are expected to be able to start operating on Jan. 19.

Los Angeles: Existing medical dispensaries will be able to start applying for adult use licenses on Jan. 1.

Red light:

Long Beach: A 180-day temporary ban on adult-use sales went into effect on Nov. 14. City officials are working on legislation that would allow for recreational sales by June 2018.

Bakersfield: The City Council banned all commercial cannabis activities.

Anaheim: The City Council banned all commercial cannabis activities.

Will jobs that drug-test employees still screen for marijuana after it’s been legalized?

Yes. Part of Proposition 64 specifically amends the state’s health and safety code, making it clear that employers can still ban their employees from using marijuana:

The rights and obligations of public and private employers to maintain a drug and alcohol free workplace or require an employer to permit or accommodate the use, consumption, possession, transfer, display, transportation, sale, or growth of cannabis in the workplace, or affect the ability of employers to have policies prohibiting the use of cannabis by employees and prospective employees, or prevent employers from complying with state or federal law.

Before Proposition 64, the California Supreme Court upheld the right of companies to fire employees for using physician-recommended marijuana even when they are not working, so recreational users aren’t likely to get any better treatment.

But there’s nothing that says companies have to drug-test, and many in California don’t. So check with your employer.

I have a medical card from the department of public health. What changes for me?

If you walk into a dispensary, you’ll notice some changes. Cannabis products will have to go through much more testing to ensure there are no harmful pesticides and that the edibles have an even distribution of THC. After Jan. 1, there will be a grace period where untested products can still be sold, but they must be labeled.

The potency levels of edibles will also be capped, according to Greg Zeman, an associate editor at Cannabis Now Magazine. Some edibles currently contain as much as 1,000 milligrams per bar, but edibles sold in adult-use dispensaries will have to be capped at total strength of no more than 100 milligrams of THC and divided into clearly identifiable servings of no more than 10 milligrams in strength each.

However, state-approved medical cards will give patients a break from paying some state taxes, and while recreational users have a possession limit of 1 ounce of dried flowers or 8 grams of concentrate, card holders can exceed that limit. For weed neophytes, an ounce could make roughly 30 joints.

Where will the taxes go?

Money was a big incentive for the state to legalize recreational marijuana. State analysts have said legalization could add up to $1 billion annually to the state coffers.

Taxes from recreational marijuana sales will primarily go toward law enforcement programs, youth education programs and environmental causes, according to Alex Traverso, spokesman for the state’s Bureau of Cannabis Control.

Traverso says the enforcement funds are necessary because, “if the goal of regulation is to diminish the black market, you have to take a percentage of those tax revenues and put them into enforcement and get people to come online.”

The state has set aside funds for the scientific study of marijuana and to see how regulations are working.

Another fund has been set up that will collect $50 million a year by 2023 to fund a suite of social and medical programs with an emphasis on mental health and job placement for at-risk individuals. Zeman says that this fund could help communities that have been hurt by the war on drugs.

Is there any scientific standard for how much marijuana is too much to drive on?

No. In California, the consequences for driving drunk and driving high are the same. But while there’s a clear blood limit for alcohol, there’s no such standard for marijuana.

“Marijuana is very different than alcohol,” says Jolene Forman, a lawyer with the Drug Policy Alliance. With alcohol, impairment links strongly with the amount you’ve had to drink, depending on your weight and gender, and disappears from your blood. But, according to Forman, marijuana can stay in your blood for weeks sometimes after you’ve consumed it, and THC can affect people very differently, making measuring THC not a very reliable measurement of someone’s driving ability.

On average, marijuana does impair driving skills for most people, especially 20 to 40 minutes after smoking, but measuring THC isn’t a good indicator of impairment.

This didn’t stop Washington and Colorado from setting a THC limit for drivers, but California doesn’t set a numerical limit on THC. Instead, the law says you can’t drive under the influence of any drug — period. It’s also illegal to consume cannabis while driving or riding in a vehicle.

Since a THC blood test won’t work, a marijuana DUI conviction in California depends on things an officer observes, such as the smell of marijuana in the car or a physical sobriety test like those given to drivers who may be drunk.

To learn more about California’s marijuana driving laws, including an Oakland-developed breathalyzer for marijuana, click here.

What about equity programs?

The war on drugs disproportionately affected people of color. While black people and white people smoke weed at similar rates, black people have been almost four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana-related charges.

With the “green rush” knocking at California’s door, cities such as Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles are looking at ways to help affected communities by creating cannabis equity programs.

To learn more about those programs and if they will work, check out this episode of the KQED podcast “Q’ed Up.”

Why does the law prohibit marijuana products with seafood?

There are several types of products that cannot be manufactured with cannabis, including:

Alcoholic beverages

“Any cannabis product that must be held at or below 41 degrees Fahrenheit to keep it safe for human consumption, including, but not limited to, cream or custard-filled pies; pies or pastries which consist in whole or in part of milk or milk products, eggs, or synthetic fillings; or meat-filled pies or pastries.”

Dairy products of any kind, except butter

Seafood products of any kind

“Any cannabis product in the shape of a human being, either realistic or caricature, animal, insect, or fruit”

Seafood in particular is banned because officials in the Department of Public Health are worried about food poisoning. This means no weed shrimp, no weed tilapia and no weed crab. Sorry.

]]>Bay Curious answers your questions about legal weed in California.Reported by Jessica Placzek, Eli Wirtschafter and Ryan Levi. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Ryan Levi, Erika Kelly and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED5814:34What Are Those Weird, Pink Ponds in San Francisco Bay?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/12/14/what-are-those-weird-pink-ponds-in-san-francisco-bay-2/
Thu, 14 Dec 2017 10:00:51 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11636854In the South Bay's colorful salt ponds, a decades-old industry continues to crystalize.In the South Bay’s colorful salt ponds, a decades-old industry continues to crystalize. This week, KQED Science reporter Lauren Sommer takes us on a trip to Cargill to learn how salt is made from San Francisco Bay Water. Listen to the Bay Curious podcast in the player above.
]]>In the South Bay's colorful salt ponds, a decades-old industry continues to crystalize.In the South Bay's colorful salt ponds, a decades-old industry continues to crystalize. <br />
<br />
Reporter by Lauren Sommer with KQED Science. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Ryan Levi, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly, Julia McEvoy and Katie McMurran.KQED579:15Is the Castro Getting Less Gay?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/12/06/is-the-castro-getting-less-gay/
Wed, 06 Dec 2017 11:00:42 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11634601How economics and cultural acceptance are changing queer communities across the Bay Area.hen I first moved to San Francisco in the summer of 2016, I was blown away by the Castro.

As a queer guy who grew up in the Midwest, I had never seen anything like it. Rainbow flags. Rainbow crosswalks. Gay couples everywhere holding hands.

I had never seen a gayer place.

But our question asker Bob Girard had a different experience the last time he was in the Castro. He lives in Ventura County with his partner and has visited the Castro a lot over the years.

“The last time we were there it just really seemed to have changed a lot,” Girard said. “Doesn’t seem to be quite the same old Castro as in years past.”

So what has changed?

“Well, it just didn’t seem to be as gay as it used to be,” he said.

Which raises the question: Is the Castro getting less gay?

While the Castro might look as gay as ever, the rainbow explosion on the streets covers up a changing neighborhood that’s home to fewer and fewer gay people.

“It’s gone from being a gay village to being a tourist destination for people around the world who want to come here and experience a little bit of the gay,” says Don Romesburg, an LGBTQ historian who moved to the Castro in the 1990s after college.

San Francisco has long had neighborhoods where LGBTQ people concentrated — North Beach, the Tenderloin, the Polk. But Romesburg says the rise of the Castro in the 1970s was different.

The Castro and the gay liberation movement gained speed together, creating a more fully realized neighborhood than any of its predecessors. There weren’t just gay bars and bathhouses in the Castro. There were gay barbers and gay doctors and opportunities to do gay activism with gay nonprofits.

“To have a place in San Francisco, in the world, where gay people can come together as a community and feel like they truly belong and that there’s no real sense of stigma, that’s what made the Castro very special for me as a young guy in my 20s,” Romesburg says.

But in a country where gay marriage is legal and acceptance of LGBTQ people is greater than ever, some argue that “gayborhoods” aren’t necessary anymore.

Romesburg agrees that this “post-gay thesis” is part of the reason why there are fewer gay people living in the Castro today.

Instead, Romesburg points the finger at a more familiar culprit: gentrification.

According to Romesburg, the mostly gay white men who moved into the Castro in the 1970s transformed the working-class neighborhood. They rebuilt old Victorian homes that lined the streets and opened popular restaurants and shops.

By the mid-to-late 1990s, the Castro had become an attractive place to live for queer and straight people alike. Romesburg says this led to a second wave of gentrification that pushed older LGBTQ people — including many older gay men with HIV and AIDS — out of the neighborhood. It also raised costs to the point where young LGBTQ people couldn’t afford to move in.

Romesburg was renting an apartment in the Castro with his partner and their young daughter when they were forced out a few years ago and couldn’t afford to rent anywhere else in the neighborhood. They stayed in San Francisco, moving to the city’s west side, but Romesburg knows of men who have left the Bay Area, moving to Southern California and even out of state after being priced out of the Castro.

“A community is woven together like a tapestry, and as you pull out the threads of it, the community becomes much more frayed,” Romesburg says. “I think of the Castro in that way. I feel like, as it becomes more of a global tourist destination and less of a community, it loses some of its heart and some of its soul.”

So where is everyone moving?

If fewer LGBTQ people are living in the Castro, where are they living?

Bob Girard and his partner are looking at moving to the Bay Area, but they don’t want to live in San Francisco. They do, however, want to make sure they end up somewhere where they’re not the only gay couple around.

“It’s not necessary that it needs to be a high percentage,” Girard says of where they’d like to move. “I’d just like to see other gay people out in public once in a while and to have more social opportunities than exist where we live now.”

Real estate agents say they’ve seen an exodus of LGBTQ people out of San Francisco and into Oakland. Taylor Sublett, an agent who works with a lot of gay clients, says they’re moving to Oakland for the same reason that everyone else is moving to Oakland: affordability, proximity to San Francisco and more space.

But unlike the Castro, there’s no one neighborhood in Oakland where gay people are concentrating.

“It’s the same places you see people concentrating from San Francisco period,” Sublett says. “They want to be able to walk to a coffee or be somewhere with that neighborhood-y feel that they’ve been priced out of in San Francisco.”

Myles Downes is one of those people. He’s a therapist who has been trying to get out of San Francisco for years.

He says many of his gay friends have moved out of the city, and it’s become harder to maintain those relationships. He’d love to find a place in Oakland where he’s surrounded by other gay people, but like a lot of people making that move, it’s not his top priority.

“There was a time when we needed ghettoization because it was safer,” Downes says. “Now we don’t really need that as much. We can go and live in the middle of a predominantly straight community, and people are pretty cool with it and it’s no big deal.”

But other places in the Bay Area with growing queer communities are trying to be a little more purposeful.

Sonoma and Alameda counties have the highest proportion of same-sex couples in the Bay Area (and in the state, along with Riverside and Santa Cruz) after San Francisco, according to the 2016 American Community Survey.

“Sonoma County is so spread out. I think if we all got together in one place, it would really show how many folks are here,” says Alisse Cottle.

When the Supreme Court ruled gay marriage was legal in 2015, Cottle and her partner, Jess Borrayo, put a rainbow flag outside Brew Coffee and Beer House, the cafe they run in downtown Santa Rosa.

They opened the restaurant at the beginning of the year without any political agenda. But with the flag now waving proudly outside, Brew started becoming a hub for the area’s growing queer community.

“It just started fitting a need that clearly people wanted it,” Cottle said. “And we didn’t really have to do much of anything but just be open to it and be willing.”

Transgender people are a big part of Santa Rosa’s LGBTQ community. The city hosts an annual transgender conference, and Brew hosted a party for a group of transgender kids in October.

Cordelia Southworth, a trans woman, has been living in Santa Rosa for more than 20 years. She has been looking to move to San Francisco recently to be a part of a more active queer community.

“But I’m really enjoying seeing what’s happening up here now that it’s starting to come together and be more visible,” she says. “So I don’t know. It might liven up around here.”

This post has been updated with the newest data from the American Community Survey.

]]>How economics and cultural acceptance are changing queer communities across the Bay Area.How economics and cultural acceptance are changing queer communities across the Bay Area.<br />
<br />
Reported by Ryan Levi. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Erika Kelly, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Jessica Placzek and David Weir. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED5610:58Can You Go To Jail For Picking California’s State Flower?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/11/30/can-you-go-to-jail-for-picking-californias-state-flower/
Thu, 30 Nov 2017 11:00:42 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11632954Rumor has it California's golden poppy has some special protections. Is it true?Bay Curious listener Josh Brett grew up Oakland, and was told from a young age that it is illegal to pick California’s state flower — the golden poppy.

“It was sort of just common knowledge as a kid growing up in the Bay Area in the 90s that it was illegal,” he says. “You might even go to jail for it!”

Brett isn’t sure where he first heard this warning — maybe older siblings, parents, or teachers. But now that he’s all grown up, he wants to know — is it true?

He asked Bay Curious:

“Is it illegal to pick California golden poppies?”

Turns out this myth is sort of true because it’s illegal to pick any plant found in state and federal parks. If you pick one, you could be prosecuted for a misdemeanor crime — punishable with a fine up to $1,000, and even 6 months in jail.

It’s also illegal to harm plants on other people’s property unless you get permission. That means one of the few places you can pick poppies without worry is in your own backyard.

Even if you wanted to pick the poppy, that’d be a waste, says Robin Binaoro, a seed ecologist at the Marin Headlands Nursery. “They’re not great flowers to pick to put in a bouquet because right when you pick ’em the petals start to fall off.”

He collects the seeds of the poppy — scientifically known as eschscholzia californica — legally.

“Once the flower dries out, the slightest touch will cause it to pop and the seeds can shoot several feet away,” says Binaoro.

Binaoro recommends keeping your poppies in the ground, where you can watch them respond to the light.

“They’re phototropic … on a sunny day you’ll see them open up, on a cloudy day they’ll stay closed,” he says.

Before It Was The State Flower

The poppy became California’s state flower in 1903, but it had many uses before the state of California even existed.

The Native Americans of the Bay Area, the Ohlone, had a lot of uses for the golden poppy, says Desiree Muñoz. She’s Rumsen Ohlone, and a ranger at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. She says the Ohlone would boil the poppy in water to make a treatment that would get rid of pesky bugs that like to live on your scalp in your hair.

The vibrant color was also a helpful signpost. Muñoz’s sister says that the Ohlone used to plant poppies atop sacred burial sites along the coast, called shell mounds. The flower’s bright color would help direct ships into the bay.

The golden poppy also has narcotic qualities.

“Sometimes the boys, when they’re fasting, they used to use the Poppy to help them on their vision quests,” says Muñoz.

Most poppies are a little bit narcotic. But they vary in intensity, the California Poppy is much milder than the opium poppy, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get you really high.

What does our listener, Josh Brett, think of all this?

“Using them as color makes a lot of sense. I was not aware of their use as a vision quest aid or de-licing. That’s a very nice, multifaceted little flower,” says Brett.

]]>Rumor has it California's golden poppy has some special protections. Is it true?Rumor has it California's golden poppy has some special protections. Is it true?<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Erika Kelly and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED557:37The Buried Ships of San Franciscohttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/11/23/the-buried-ships-of-san-francisco/
Thu, 23 Nov 2017 11:00:49 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11633087The hulls of several dozen ships can be found below ground in the middle of San Francisco.
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.This week’s episode of the Bay Curious podcast explores why between 30 and 60 ships are buried in San Francisco — sometimes half a mile or more from the modern-day coastline.

n the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, you can grab a drink at the Old Ship Saloon. Owner Bill Duffy says the bar opened in 1851 inside the hull of the Arkansas, a ship that now lies in the dirt below the bar.

“People who wanted to go to the bar would have to get up this plank and in through the side of the ship,” says Duffy.

The Arkansas is one of 30 to 60 ships buried under the city. Some are marked with above-ground plaques, but many go completely unrecognized — a ghost fleet beneath your feet. Which brings us to the question:

Why are there ships under San Francisco?

Most of the buried ships lie under the Financial District and the Embarcadero — two of the city’s flattest neighborhoods. In a city known for its hills, you’d hardly know it taking a walk from the Embarcadero to the Transamerica Building.

“You can find the original shoreline by using your feet,” says Kevin Boyd, senior science writer at the Exploratorium, where an exhibit called “The Changing Shoreline of San Francisco” is currently on display. “As soon as you find yourself heading uphill at any significant degree, you can be pretty sure you’re close to the early shoreline.”

But why did the shoreline change? And how did the ships get buried there?

“San Francisco in 1848 was a small town of a few hundred. But the discovery of gold that year had a pretty big impact. The small town became a city,” says James Delgado, a maritime archaeologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and author of “Gold Rush Port.”

After gold was discovered, ships pregnant with people and goods poured into the Bay Area. They dropped anchor in the deeper waters offshore, somewhere below today’s Bay Bridge.

Once moored, many of the ships never set sail again. Some vessels had arrived to the Gold Coast in a decrepit state, the owners knowingly sending the ships to the bay on their last voyage. Other ships simply had trouble leaving once sailors caught gold fever.

“There were large numbers of desertions, in some cases even officers,” says Delgado.

The harbor became clogged as the number of ships climbed near 1,000. As the mass grew, the ships became a greater nuisance. Many of the ships had to have their rigging taken down in order to avoid entanglement with neighboring vessels. Contemporary observers often referred to it as a “forest of masts.”

Because the ships were stationed offshore in deep water, goods had to be slogged across half a mile of the shallow, muddy tidal flats. Merchants had to pay workers handsomely to forget about their gold fever and accept the job of a porter.

Eventually, politicians devised a solution to lessen these hefty expenses: bring the shoreline closer to deep water. The city began selling water lots out in the bay on the condition that buyers fill them in with land.

“In order to secure the title, you would put real property on it,” says Delgado. “You could drive pilings and build a fence around it. But the easiest, cheapest way was to do that with a ship.”

Land in Gold Rush-era San Francisco was incredibly valuable and people tried to secure these water lots any way they could.

“If you scuttled your ship, you could claim the land under it as part of your salvage,” says Richard Everett, curator of the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.

Some men used this technicality to lay claim to other people’s lots. They were known as the “hulk undertakers.”

In the dead of night, they would sail ships over valuable lots, unplug holes drilled into the ship’s keel and conveniently lose the vessel on the spot.

“There were actual open wars. One day the captain of the hulk undertakers was in the midst of giving a command when a wharf employee fired a shot at him. His mouth was open, he was yelling, and the bullet passed through one cheek and out the other, missing his tongue and his teeth. To the end of his days he wore a beard to cover those two scars on either side of his mouth,” says Delgado.

Besides land, San Francisco also needed buildings. Because the city grew so rapidly and lumber was expensive to mill, many of the early buildings were constructed of canvas tents. One visitor described San Francisco as a magic lantern city at night, because the tents covering the hillsides would glow from within. While this may have been picturesque, the residents wanted more permanent structures, so they turned to the ships in the harbor.

The junker ships were taken to “Rotten Row,” where Charles Hare and the local Chinese community systematically broke down hundreds of ships. The wood and metal were recycled into building materials.

About 200 of the nicer ships were easily turned into permanent structures. The majority were used as warehouses but other ships became hotels, offices, bars, counting houses, restaurants, auction halls, banks, cafes and a church. Even the city jail moved onto a ship once the old one became overcrowded and worn.

“One of the prisoners actually was said to have taken the door off its hinges and carried it on his back to make a show and to demand that the jailer feed him because the jailer had skipped a meal,” says Delgado.

As lots of water was filled and the city expanded into the bay, many of the floating buildings found themselves surrounded by land, sitting along city streets.

But then there were a series of fires. The biggest blaze ripped through the city on May 4, 1851. It took out about 20 city blocks and destroyed more than a thousand buildings.

“That was the giant fire that took out most of the waterfront. Many of the ships burned down to their water lines,” says Everett.

Dozens of ships stayed behind, and remain firmly anchored in what today is the Financial District or Embarcadero.

The city forgot about the ships. One by one, they’ve been built over. Nowadays, we barely think about the hulks lying just under our feet.

That is, until we have to lay a new foundation or dig a fresh tunnel.

In 1994, Muni was digging a light-rail tunnel beneath Justin Herman Plaza on the Embarcadero when workers hit a ship — the Rome. The vessel was so huge they literally had to tunnel through. Now, thousands of riders on J, K, L, M, N and T trains unknowingly ride through its hull every day.

Subscribe to the Bay Curious podcast on Tune In, iTunes, NPR One, or wherever you get your podcasts.

]]>The hulls of several dozen ships can be found below ground in the middle of San Francisco. - Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. - The hulls of several dozen ships can be found below ground in the middle of San Francisco. <br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED546:36The True History of Irish Coffee and Its San Francisco Originshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/11/16/the-true-history-of-irish-coffee-and-its-san-francisco-origins/
Thu, 16 Nov 2017 11:00:20 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11621844Legend has it the Irish coffee was brought to the U.S. by the Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco.When Sara Russell was a kid, her mom would bring her to the Buena Vista Cafe across from Aquatic Park and regale her with stories of the bar’s history and its famous Irish coffees.

“Her and her friends would take the Hyde Street cable car, because back then [in the 1960s] it was a local thing, and she’d come here and get an Irish coffee,” said Russell. The small bar was a glamorous place filled with true stories and tall tales. As an adult, Russell has come back here on dates.

“And I was always told that the Irish coffee was invented here, in this place, in San Francisco,” she said.

Now, she wants to know if that story is totally accurate.

Was Irish coffee invented in San Francisco?

On a regular day, the Buena Vista serves around 2,000 Irish coffees—up to 2,500 on a busy weekend day, said Lea Hausherr, who has been a waitress there for 14 years and is the informal historian of the place.

As we watched, the bartender lined up hot glasses all the way down the bar, filling each with hot water. After pouring the water out, he replaced it with two sugar cubes and topped that with hot coffee, which the bar goes through so quickly that it always stays fresh. Then the bartender stirred up every glass, “like Bob Marley,” he added. As he stirred, he splashed a little bit of the drinks out here and there, to make sure each cup looked the same all down the bar. Irish whiskey, always Tullamore Dew, was next and then cold heavy cream spooned on top.

And there you have it: the famous Irish coffee, reportedly invented right here in this bar.

As Russell, Bay Curious host Olivia Allen-Price and I all sipped our Irish coffees, Hausherr told us the legendary tale of the drink.

“It was not originated in San Francisco. But it was introduced first in San Francisco to America,” she said, right here at the Buena Vista 65 years ago.

The Myth, The Man, The Story

“It was 1952, it was a dark and stormy night, Nov. 10 to be exact,” said Hausherr. “The owner of the Buena Vista at the time, his name was Jack Koeppler, he was behind the bar.” Sitting at the bar was the popular San Francisco Chronicle travel writer of the time, Stanton Delaplane, who had written many columns about this amazing drink he’d had at the Foynes airport in Ireland: Gaelic coffee.

Click on the images to read Delaplane’s “Postcards from Shannon” in the Chronicle.

That night, the two of them set about trying to replicate the drink.

“They tried it, they tried different glasses, they tried different whiskeys, they tried everything they could think of,” said Hausherr, “but the cream kept falling down to the bottom.”

Eventually, Koeppler became so obsessed with perfecting the Irish coffee that he even flew to the original source: the Foynes Flying Boat terminal, which later closed and was replaced by the nearby Shannon airport. It was at the Foynes terminal that cook Joe Sheridan reportedly invented the drink.

And that brings us to the other half of the story.

According to the Foynes Flying Boat Museum and the story Hasherr passed on, the drink was invented on another dark and stormy night a decade earlier in 1943. A Pan Am flight headed to New York was forced to turn back in the bad weather. When it pulled into the Foynes terminal, the cold and tired passengers disembarked.

“They wanted to warm up the Yanks,” said Hausherr.

Sheridan was a cook at the time, and whipped up the perfect drink to keep the Yanks warm and awake: coffee with Irish whiskey and a little extra sugar and cream for the American palate.

What is this, asked one of the passengers, Brazilian coffee? No, he said, it’s Irish coffee!

It was Sheridan who Buena Vista owner, Jack Koeppler, visited 10 years later looking for help making his own authentic version to bring to San Francisco. Sheridan aided the project and even came over to San Francisco, though it’s unclear if he worked at the Buena Vista. Either way, Sheridan stuck around, and when he died, he was buried in Oakland.

The final recipe Koeppler settled on used aged cream from the San Francisco mayor at the time, who also ran a dairy. To fluff up the cream and help it float, Koeppler added more sugar and a healthy dose of heavy whipping.

“We now have what they came up with in 1952. It’s been the exact same recipe all this time,” said Hausherr.

Or so the story goes.

Another Take

“That’s the most widely accepted version,” said Eric Felten, author of “How’s Your Drink?” and a former drink columnist for the Wall Street Journal. But Felten has two problems with it.

First, Felten is not sure that Joe Sheridan really invented the drink to warm up passengers at an airport one night.

“It’s possible the drink was actually invented in 1940 or so at a pub called the Dolphin in Dublin,” said Felten.

This is based on an account from a Harvard professor of Irish Studies, and on the argument that the cream and sugar were more reasonably added to disguise the taste of coffee during World War II than to warm up passengers one night.

However it started, the drink likely spread quickly to the airport (or it’s even possible that Sheridan had the drink, or a similar one, while living nearby in Dublin and drew his inspiration from it). Ultimately, though, it was from the airport that Irish coffee went out into the wider world, as travelers like Delaplane brought back word of a special kind of coffee mixed with whiskey, sugar and cream.

The other hiccup in the Buena Vista’s tale, though, is that Delaplane isn’t the only traveler who brought word back to the U.S. There’s historical evidence that Irish coffee made its appearance in New York four years before that fateful night at the Buena Vista.

“The first instance I can find of the Irish coffee coming to the U.S. is the food critic for the New York Herald Tribune, named Clementine Paddleford. For her St. Patrick’s Day column in 1948, she talks up the Irish coffee and she gives the recipe. It’s clearly the Irish coffee we know,” said Felten.

However, Felten does note that it wasn’t in New York that the drink really gained popularity or caught on. “It is the case that it’s in San Francisco that the Irish coffee really became a sensation,” he said, “thanks to Stanton Delaplane.”

And thanks to the heavy marketing by the Buena Vista, like this ad they ran in the 1950s, the drink gained popularity. Felten was also impressed with how the cafe has maintained that recipe over the years.

“I was in San Francisco and went to the Buena Vista to have an Irish coffee, and I was extremely pleased with how good a drink they were making,” he said.

Cheers!

A confession: Our Bay Curious host, Olivia, had never had an Irish coffee before she was enlisted to drink many of them — for the sake of investigative reporting. She’s now a convert.

“It’s amazing,” she said, after sipping her first.

“Creamy, yummy, silky, good,” agreed Russell.

And what did our question-asker think about the nearly true story of its origins? “I think it tastes great and it doesn’t matter what the story is. I was just curious,” she said.

Cheers to that!
____

Make your own Irish coffee with this recipe:

Fill glass with hot water to heat it up, then dump out the water.

Drop in two cocktail sugar cubes.

Pour hot coffee over the sugar cubes, to fill about 3/4 of the glass.

Stir until the sugar is dissolved and mixed.

Add Irish whiskey with a bit of room left in the glass.

Spoon heavy, cold cream on top.

]]>Legend has it the Irish coffee was brought to the U.S. by the Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco.Legend has it the Irish coffee was brought to the U.S. by the Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco. <br />
<br />
Reported by Kelly O'Mara. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.<br />KQED539:27Bay Curious Lightning Round: Inspiration for AT-ATs, the ‘Tenderloin’ and Popeye’s Voicehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/11/09/bay-curious-lightning-round-inspiration-for-at-ats-the-tenderloin-and-popeyes-voice/
Thu, 09 Nov 2017 20:30:13 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11629563'Were the AT-ATs in 'Star Wars' inspired by the cranes at the Port of Oakland?' and more questions answered!This week the Bay Curious podcast is celebrating our one-year anniversary with a lightning round of questions and answers!

Is it true that George Lucas was inspired to create the AT-AT because of the cranes at the Port of Oakland?

Hartlaub also followed up with Phil Tippett, the stop-motion animator who oversaw production of the AT-AT sequence. Tippett allows for a small chance that somewhere in the process someone looked at the cranes, but added that the original vehicles actually looked nothing like container cranes, and more like garbage trucks.

Sidenote on Phil Tippett: He was credited as “Dinosaur Supervisor” at the end of “Jurassic Park” and has been the topic of several popular internet memes. Poor guy has spent years now explaining what the “supervision” element of his job actually was.

Question submitted by Bay Curious listener Matteen Mokalla.

How did the Tenderloin get its name?

In the mid-1800s the Tenderloin was a great spot to spend a night out on the town, but by the late 1800s, crime had crept into the neighborhood. It was around this time that people began calling the area the Tenderloin.

So how did it get the name? Was it a reference to the “tender loins” of prostitutes who did business there? Or maybe something to do with the shape of the neighborhood?

No. According to the Tenderloin Museum, the name came from a New York City police captain named Alexander Williams who supposedly called vice-heavy areas the “tenderloin”, in reference to all the bribes he would get for turning a blind eye to illegal activities. Williams was quoted as saying, “I’ve had nothing but chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.”

He hoped to buy nicer meat with his bribe money.

Question submitted by Bay Curious listener Kevin Beach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8O0PwGSoO0

Is it true that the original voice of Popeye died in a San Jose trailer park?

Yes. The gruff voice of William Costello was the original voice of Popeye the Sailor Man.

But the show’s producers wanted a softer voice for Popeye, and Costello was becoming difficult to work with. One day, while the show was in the middle of production, Costello asked for a vacation and he was fired.

After that, Costello had a long career as a musician. According to his obituary, Costello worked with Ginger Rogers and Bing Crosby and went on to play in over 100 orchestras.

In the late 1950s, he retired to manage a trailer park in San Jose. He remained manager until he died in 1971 at the age of 73.

Question submitted by Bay Curious listener Peter Caravalho.

Why Are There Rainbows on the Tunnel Between S.F. and Marin?

]]>'Were the AT-ATs in 'Star Wars' inspired by the cranes at the Port of Oakland?' and more questions answered!
Is it true that George Lucas was inspired to create the AT-AT because of the cranes at the Port of Oakland?
No. Sadly, this is not true.

Hartlaub also followed up with Phil Tippett, the stop-motion animator who oversaw production of the AT-AT sequence. Tippett allows for a small chance that somewhere in the process someone looked at the cranes, but added that the original vehicles actually looked nothing like container cranes, and more like garbage trucks.

Sidenote on Phil Tippett: He was credited as "Dinosaur Supervisor" at the end of "Jurassic Park" and has been the topic of several popular internet memes. Poor guy has spent years now explaining what the "supervision" element of his job actually was.

Question submitted by Bay Curious listener Matteen Mokalla.

How did the Tenderloin get its name?
In the mid-1800s the Tenderloin was a great spot to spend a night out on the town, but by the late 1800s, crime had crept into the neighborhood. It was around this time that people began calling the area the Tenderloin.

So how did it get the name? Was it a reference to the “tender loins” of prostitutes who did business there? Or maybe something to do with the shape of the neighborhood?

No. According to the Tenderloin Museum, the name came from a New York City police captain named Alexander Williams who supposedly called vice-heavy areas the “tenderloin”, in reference to all the bribes he would get for turning a blind eye to illegal activities. Williams was quoted as saying, "I’ve had nothing but chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin."

He hoped to buy nicer meat with his bribe money.

Question submitted by Bay Curious listener Kevin Beach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8O0PwGSoO0
Is it true that the original voice of Popeye died in a San Jose trailer park?
Yes. The gruff voice of William Costello was the original voice of Popeye the Sailor Man.

But the show's producers wanted a softer voice for Popeye, and Costello was becoming difficult to work with. One day, while the show was in the middle of production, Costello asked for a vacation and he was fired.

After that, Costello had a long career as a musician. According to his obituary, Costello worked with Ginger Rogers and Bing Crosby and went on to play in over 100 orchestras.

In the late 1950s, he retired to manage a trailer park in San Jose. He remained manager until he died in 1971 at the age of 73.

Question submitted by Bay Curious listener Peter Caravalho.

Why Are There Rainbows on the Tunnel Between S.F. and Marin?
We answered this question in a separate post. Check it out!

]]>KQED5215:03Why Are There Rainbows on the Tunnel Between S.F. and Marin? (Plus Bonus Anniversary Questions)https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/11/09/why-are-there-rainbows-on-the-tunnel-between-s-f-and-marin-plus-bonus-anniversary-questions/
Thu, 09 Nov 2017 19:10:31 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11629112It started as a quest to make Bay Area highways more beautiful.It’s the Bay Curious podcast’s one-year anniversary! To celebrate, we’re answering four questions in one episode. So buckle up.

Anyone who has driven between San Francisco and Marin on Highway 101 in the past half-century has made the journey underneath a rainbow, regardless of the weather.

Jessica Schimm often rode through what was then known as the Waldo Tunnel (named after 19th century California politician William Waldo) just north of the Golden Gate Bridge when she was a kid growing up in San Francisco.

“As a kid, my dad worked in San Francisco, and the rainbow tunnel was kind of the first landmark associated with the city,” says Schimm, who now lives in New York City. “Going through the tunnel, we’d always be chanting, ‘Rainbow tunnel! Rainbow tunnel!’ and I remember asking my parents, ‘Why does it have the rainbow on it?’ and neither of them could answer the question.”

All these years later, the tunnel has a new name — the Robin Williams Tunnel — but Schimm is still looking for an answer:

Why are there rainbows painted on the tunnel and who painted them?

Anniversary Bonus Question

Is it true that George Lucas was inspired to create the AT-AT because of the cranes at the Port of Oakland? Get the answer in our lightning round post!

The story starts in the 1960s with a guy named Robert Halligan Sr. driving through what was, at the time, some drab-looking concrete tunnels between San Francisco and Marin.

“My dad commuted there every single day,” says Robert Halligan Jr. The Halligans lived in Marinwood at the time, and Halligan Sr. thought it would be great if there was something a little nicer to welcome commuters driving back to the North Bay at the end of the day.

But Halligan Sr. was not your average commuter. He was also the public affairs officer with the California Department of Transportation, and he had a flair for the creative.

At the time, the Bay Area was opening a lot of new freeways, and Halligan Sr. put his creative mind to work. His son says he had a Silicon Valley robot clip the ribbon at one ceremony and had a local traffic helicopter drive through the ribbon at another.

This was also the time — the 1960s and ’70s — when highway planners were thinking a lot about the aesthetics and design of the roads they were laying down. Californians were spending a lot of time on the roads, and people thought it would be nice if those roads were a little more beautiful.

Anniversary Bonus Question

How did the Tenderloin get its name? Was it a reference to the “tender loins” of prostitutes who did business there? Or maybe something to do with the shape of the neighborhood? Get the answer in our lightning round post!

So when Halligan Sr. proposed painting rainbows at the entrance to the tunnels in Marin, his colleagues said they were on board.

“The rainbow tunnels were simply part of that kind of experience, trying to improve the aesthetics of concrete in people’s lives,” Halligan Jr. said.

But it wasn’t just their colorful presence that made rainbows the right choice. Halligan Jr. says the half-circle shape of the tunnel openings made a rainbow “naturally conducive” to the project.

When the rainbows first went up, most residents loved them, but a few hated the new paint job. The two sides battled it out in the Letters to the Editor page of the San Rafael Daily Independent Journal.

“This is a disfiguration of the landscape and an insult to the quiet beauty of this entire county,” wrote Dr. and Mrs. Alan J. Davidson of Mill Valley on Nov. 3, 1970. “The pastels of Cartoonland should be confined to the Sunday funnies.”

“Did a muse, en route to an appointment with Andy Warhol, veer off course and land in the Division of Highways? Let us be grateful for an inspired treatment of dull, gray concrete!” countered Lewis W. Stewart of San Anselmo on Nov. 10, 1970.

“My dad used to say if it’s not controversial, it’s not art,” Halligan Jr. said.

And he didn’t stop caring about his controversial artwork. When it came time to give the rainbow a new paint job, Halligan Sr. was not impressed with the work.

Anniversary Bonus Question

Is it true that the original voice of Popeye died in a San Jose trailer park? Get the answer in our lightning round post!

“My dad looked at them and said, ‘Oh my God, they repainted them the faded colors,’ ” Halligan Jr. said. “So they had to go back and repaint them the original bright colors you see today.”

Ultimately, Halligan Sr. considered the rainbow tunnels to be one of the best things he accomplished during his career. When he died in 1999, the San Francisco Chronicle even mentioned them in his obituary.

“He was a simple man,” Halligan Jr. said, “but a simple man that was in a position to have things that have had a legacy that lasts far beyond him, which is amazing. Few of us get a chance to do that.”

]]>It started as a quest to make Bay Area highways more beautiful.It started as a quest to make Bay Area highways more beautiful. Plus, three other bonus questions!<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek and Olivia Allen-Price. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED15:08El Camino Not-So-Real: The True Story of the ‘Ancient Road’https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/11/02/el-camino-not-so-real-the-true-story-of-the-ancient-road/
Thu, 02 Nov 2017 10:00:43 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11621122Legend has it that El Camino Real is an ancient road that connects the Spanish missions. But is it true?El Camino Real — originally part of 101 — runs the length of the Peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose. Its very name implies a regal history. Translated from the Spanish, it means “The King’s Highway.”

Legend has it that El Camino Real in Silicon Valley is part of the historic Mission Trail, an ancient road that connects the Spanish missions, which stretch like a string of pearls along the California coast.

But is that true?

Debbie Torrey of Campbell asked Bay Curious the question “What can you find about The El Camino Real history?”

There, Senkewicz began to unravel a series of falsehoods that have been “common wisdom,” starting with the surprising truth that there were many El Camino Reals all over the land that Spain used to control in the New World, from 1769 to 1821.

“Technically, all of this belonged to the King of Spain,” Senkewicz says, and many major roads would have been called El Camino Real.

Then he makes a left turn I was not expecting.

“What happened in terms of the El Camino Real has more to do with Southern California than it does with Northern California,” Senkewicz says. “By about the 1870s, you get more and more Anglos, Americans, coming into Southern California. And the Anglo population really increases with the arrival of the railroads in Los Angeles in the 1880s.”

In America, there’s a rich tradition of just-got-here-yesterday people concocting romantic origin myths, and a number of influential Southern Californians wanted one of their own. They looked around and saw crumbling Spanish missions: 21 of them, from the Mexican border all the way north to Sonoma.

“The mission past that they construct was a fantasy past: heroic missionaries, happy, contented Indians, fandangos all over the place,” Senkewicz says.

Of course, what was really going on here was the enslavement of local tribespeople, who were reeling under the impact of European diseases, forced religious conversion and the destruction of their entire way of life.

Not that our question asker Debbie Torrey — or I — learned much of this in the fourth grade, which is when a lot of California schoolchildren study the subject.

“You’re right,” Torrey says. “They did glamorize it, thinking it was all wonderful.”

There were a number of ways the Spanish were given credit for things they didn’t do.

“Often enough you read in textbooks that they blazed trails,” Senkewicz says. “They didn’t blaze trails. They followed trails that had already been developed by indigenous people up and down the California coast.”

But at the turn of the 20th century, as Phoebe S. Kropp details in her excellent book, “California Vieja,” few people wanted that version of history. They wanted something fun, happy and exotic. Groups like the Landmarks Club, led by the Los Angeles historian Charles Lummis, and the Native Daughters of the Golden West pushed to reframe a collection of dirt roads into a “rediscovered” king’s highway.

In many ways, they were inspired by works of fiction like Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel, “Ramona.” Although Jackson meant to expose the mistreatment of the “Mission Indians,” the book fed the public’s desire for a romanticized vision of Spanish California.

The myth spread further when the Automobile Club of Southern California decided that this fantasy past was a great way of getting people to buy and drive automobiles.

“They begin to push the notion that there was one central road, which they named the El Camino Real, that connected the missions. They began to push the notion that the missions were located a day’s journey from each other,” Senkewicz says. “Which kind of, when you kind of think about it, makes them motels, rather than what they actually were: agents of assimilation of the native peoples.”

If you think about it, the walk between Mission Dolores in San Francisco and Mission Santa Clara would make for a really long day.

Also, look at this 1915 map from the Automobile Club of Southern California. Once you get north of Central California, it becomes much less clear how Bay Area missions are one day’s drive apart. (Also, the mapmaker got the name of the mission in modern-day Fremont wrong. It’s Mission San Jose.)

So why did Northern California play along with this Southern California fantasy? Senkewicz says the concept caught on with wealthy Californians like Jane Stanford, wife of the railroad baron Leland Stanford, and prominent Catholics like San Francisco Mayor James Phelan. They wanted the Spanish missions restored to something like their former glory.

“A lot of them were really in sad shape,” Senkewicz says. “If you look at pictures from the 1860s and the 1870s, the missions are crumbling!”

Consider this: If the Spanish Revival movement had not happened, we might be looking at a string of ruins along the California coast.

Years ago, Debbie Torrey took her kids on a multi-mission tour, but told them a lot of stuff that turns out to be bunk.

Now she plans to take her grandkids. They’ll get the truth.

Special thanks to the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra for use of the last movement, Grave–Tempo di Fandango, of Boccherini’s String Quintet in D major, G 341. It was recorded in 2005, with Jordi Savall conducting and Tanya Tomkins playing the cello solo.

]]>Legend has it that El Camino Real is an ancient road that connects the Spanish missions. But is it true?Legend has it, El Camino Real is an ancient road that connects the Spanish missions. But is it true?<br />
<br />
Reported by Rachael Myrow. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED518:40Why Are There So Many Dead People in Colma? And So Few in San Francisco?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/10/26/why-are-so-many-dead-people-in-colma-and-so-few-in-san-francisco/
Thu, 26 Oct 2017 14:00:07 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10779164Decades ago, hundreds of thousands of bodies were moved from San Francisco to Colma.When you drive around the tiny town of Colma, just south of Daly City, you can’t help but notice a certain redundancy of scenery.

Tombstones. A florist …

More tombstones … another florist.

What Las Vegas is to gambling, Colma is to death.

Nearly three-quarters of the 2.2-square-mile town is zoned for cemeteries — of which there are 17.

Colma is the last place you want to be when the zombie apocalypse goes down.

The town’s population is 1,431, says Pat Hatfield of the local historical association.

“Of the living …,” I clarify.

She nods. “Above-ground residents, we call them. Maybe a million and a half underground, so we’re a little bit outgunned.”

The association’s headquarters sits quietly between two cemeteries. It doubles as a museum, with binders on display for each of the town’s final resting places. Flip through and your eye catches on bold-letter names like Joe DiMaggio and William Randolph Hearst. When death got the drop on Wyatt Earp, the legendary Old West lawman was buried in Hills of Eternity Memorial Park, a Jewish cemetery. (Here’s why.)

On the other hand, if you want to browse graves in San Francisco, your choices are limited.

The lone cemetery in the city proper is at Mission Dolores. But the cemetery is just one-sixth its original size, says Andrew Galvan, the Mission Dolores curator. Eleven thousand dead people were buried there from 1782 to 1898.

All right. That accounts for thousands of expired locals.

Where’s everybody else?

San Francisco Graveyards of the Past

“In the Gold Rush days they decided to build cemeteries in the western part of the city, where nobody would ever want to live,” says Michael Svanevik, a San Mateo County historian who’s the go-to guy on this topic.

Four huge cemeteries — Laurel Hill, Calvary, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Masonic Cemetery — were established on land the University of San Francisco occupies today. These cemeteries took up between 60 and 70 square blocks. Golden Gate Cemetery, out by Lands End, took up a similar swath of space.

As San Francisco’s population rapidly grew, homes were built on all sides of the cemetery complex. Streetcars had to navigate around these islands of the dead to transport residents to work and back.

“This now became very valuable land, and people turned against the cemeteries,” Svanevik says.

Just when you think the living have a hard time holding onto their place in San Francisco, imagine how the dead fared.

Public Opinion Turns

By 1880, San Franciscans had grown disenchanted with its burgeoning population of dead folks.

Headlines like “Cemeteries must go!” began to show up in local newspapers, and residents became concerned over hysterical claims about health hazards.

“Scientists warned that throat maladies constantly assume a malignant type … when the patients are exposed to a wind that blows from a crowded cemetery,” wrote Svanevik and co-author Shirley Burgett in their book “City of Souls.”

In 1901, San Francisco banned any new burials within city limits, part of what Svanevik and Burgett call a relentless assault on the city’s “belt of death.” For several decades, what to do with the cemeteries was a hot-button issue.

Those who coveted valuable graveyard land could rely on at least one legitimate talking point: The cemeteries had become a real mess.

After San Francisco ended new burials, there was no money to care for existing cemetery grounds, and many graveyards fell into ruin. Statues and gravestones were toppled. The valuable bronze doors on private mausoleums were stolen. People would reportedly wander in and get drunk, or have late-night sex orgies.

“Entire skeletons were carried away to be used as Halloween decorations,” says Svanevik.

He’s even met people who report playing soccer with skulls.

Colma: The Incorporation

The first to move out of San Francisco were two Jewish cemeteries, Hills of Eternity and Home of Peace. In the 1880s, they abandoned the plots of land that now make up Dolores Park for the open farm area of Colma. A few years later, the San Francisco Archdiocese, running out of room in San Francisco, established Colma’s Holy Cross Cemetery.

As space for San Francisco burials grew tighter, more of San Francisco’s cemetery associations looked south, purchasing large plots of Colma’s farmland.

In 1924, 14 cemetery associations incorporated the town of Lawndale (Colma’s original name). It is the only city incorporated for the sole purpose of preserving and protecting the dead, says the historical association’s Pat Hatfield.

The founders had good reason to be explicit about the new town’s purpose. After all, many of the remains that came to Colma had been moved several times. A body could have first been buried in the Gold Rush cemetery, only to be moved to Yerba Buena Cemetery, on to City Cemetery by the Legion of Honor, and finally to the cemetery complex where USF now stands.

“They didn’t want living people in Colma,” says Svanevik. “Every time somebody came forth and wanted to open a store, the town council voted it down, unless it was a floral shop or something associated with a cemetery.”

San Francisco: And Then There Were Five

By the 1920s, the only San Francisco cemeteries remaining were the so-called Big Four as well as the one at Mission Dolores. In the face of public hostility, the Odd Fellows and Masonic cemeteries agreed to move to Colma, but 17 families went to federal court to block the Masonic move. Those bodies were transferred only after sale of the land was approved in a 1930 Supreme Court ruling.

The Catholic Church successfully made the case that the Mission Dolores cemetery should be allowed to stay for historical reasons. Andrew Galvan of Mission Dolores says just 60 bodies were moved to Colma between 1930 and 1932.

The Catholic Church also balked at uprooting Calvary Cemetery. The archdiocese didn’t like the idea of giving future plot owners in other cemeteries the idea that nothing is sacred or permanent — not even the place where you are laid to rest.

More on Colma

Is Colma Shaped Like an Angel? Or Daemon?

What’s It Like to Grow Up in Colma?

Anti-cemetery activists made three unsuccessful attempts at ridding the city of Laurel Hill by putting the issue before voters.

In 1937 they tried once more. The official argument against the measure alluded to the many notable pioneers buried in the cemetery. “Gratitude and common decency should permit these dead to rest in honored peace,” it said.

On the pro-eviction side, proponents included photos of the decrepit graveyard marred by tumbled tombstones, above captions such as “Is this ‘respect for our dead’?”

This time, the measure to evict passed.

Removing the Bodies

Exhumation and transportation of the bodies was a very sophisticated operation.

If the casket was in good shape, they moved it with the body. If the casket had deteriorated, the bones were placed in boxes. Remains were required to be brought by hearse on the same day as exhumation, says Svanevik. The Catholic Church also required a priest to witness the exhumation of any bodies from Calvary Cemetery.

“Condition of remains disinterred varied from ‘dust’ to almost perfectly embalmed bodies, the latter resulting from filling of cast-iron caskets with groundwater acting as a preservative,” wrote William Proctor, in a 1950 San Francisco Department of City Planning report. “The smell of death was often present, even though the remains had been laid to rest from thirty to seventy years previously,” the head of the disinterment told Proctor.

About 130,000 bodies were disinterred from the “Big Four” cemeteries and moved to Colma. Most were reburied in mass graves, with a single monument to mark their presence.

For the 55,000 Catholic pioneers who were moved from San Francisco to Holy Cross in Colma, no marker identified them at their new resting place until 1993.

Where the Tombstones Went

When the San Francisco cemeteries were moved, the bodies were transported for free, but survivors had to pay if they wanted to keep the tombstones. Many survivors couldn’t be found, and the majority of tombstones did not make the trip to Colma. Instead, they were sold for a few pennies each to be used in public works, says Svanevik.

Some lined the gutters, which you can still see, in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. Others were spread around the city.

“Priceless crypts, tombs and private mausoleums were unceremoniously dumped in San Francisco Bay to create breakwaters at Aquatic Park and Saint Francis yacht club,” wrote Svanevik and Burgett in “City of Souls.”

And discarded tombstones were used to build a seawall along the Great Highway. They still resurface from time to time, as they did in 2012 at Ocean Beach.

Some Left Behind

“They missed a lot of the bodies,” says Alan Ziajka, the University of San Francisco’s official historian, speaking of the mass transfer to Colma. “No one knew that until 1950, when we put up our first major building after the Depression.”

That was Gleeson Library, which like much of the university was built over what was once Masonic Cemetery. At least 200 bodies were found during excavations, when a backhoe churned up a whole mausoleum. Since then, every time a major excavation has occurred on campus, remains have been found.

A work crew breaking ground on the Hayes-Healy residence hall in 1966 “came upon so many bones and skulls that they refused to continue working until the human remains were moved from the site,” Ziajka wrote in his book, “Lighting the City, Changing the World, a History of the Sciences at the University of San Francisco.”

Legion of Honor: Where Bodies are Buried

One of the most startling cemetery discoveries came in 1993, when the Legion of Honor was undergoing seismic renovation. As the dig began, about 750 bodies were discovered from the Golden Gate Cemetery, also called City Cemetery, which was used from 1868 to 1909. About 18,000 people were buried there.

One person who got a close-up look at the Legion of Honor remains was photographer Richard Barnes. His exhibit on the discovery has traveled around the country.

“I think the juxtaposition with the grand temple of art is pretty interesting,” Barnes says. “The idea of preservation of the past and what that represents. Whose past is honored and secured and whose is expendable?”

Barnes told SF Weekly in 1997 that the original Legion of Honor contractors, working in the early 1920s, “just plowed through burial sites, and plumbers laid pipes right through bodies and skeletons.”

“They threw headstones off the cliff into the ocean,” he says.

The Lincoln Park Golf Course was also built where Golden Gate Cemetery once stood.

“What is presently the eighteenth fairway of the golf course was a burial ground, primarily for the city’s Italian community. The area that now constitutes the first and thirteenth fairway was the Chinese section of the cemetery and the high terrain at the fifteen fairway and thirteenth tee was a Serbian resting place.”

Can It Happen Again?

Some find the odyssey of San Francisco’s dead prior to the 20th century unnerving. Who knew that after you die, your body could be so peripatetic?

San Francisco is a testament to the reality that your remains may not remain … or that they may remain when they’re not supposed to — and you’ll get a building on top of you to boot.

Ensuring that your final resting place is really your final resting place was the very idea behind establishing Colma as a modern-day necropolis.

Yet even in Colma, the sanctity of the grave is not what it used to be. The needs and whims of the living have encroached over the years. For example, Sunset View Cemetery, a burial ground for paupers, in 1951 became a golf course. (Photos of the defunct cemetery at the San Francisco Public Library.)

“The question I get so frequently is: ‘Is Colma safe?’ “says Svanevik. “I want to say Colma is safe, but I’ve noticed since 1970 the largest auto row south of San Francisco is in Colma. They have a Home Depot. At one point a portion of Greenlawn cemetery was cut away to make a movie theater.

“I can stand in Colma cemeteries today and hear a PA system say, ‘Your car is ready to be serviced.’ ”

And so it goes …

]]>Decades ago, hundreds of thousands of bodies were moved from San Francisco to Colma.Reported by Jon Brooks. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED8:03Wildfires: You’ve Got Questions, We’ve Got Answershttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/10/19/wildfires-youve-got-questions-weve-got-answers/
Thu, 19 Oct 2017 16:43:58 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11624317What does containment mean? How are wildfires named? What happens after your house burns?Deadly wildfires have ravaged Northern California this month. People have lost their lives, their homes, their businesses and their sense of security. We asked you what questions you had about wildfires, and this week, Bay Curious has some answers.

What does it mean when a fire is contained or controlled?

Once a fire starts, the goal is suppression, and the first step is containment. Fire updates often include a “percent contained” figure. It took several days for fire crews to get more than 10 percent containment on the fires burning in Northern California this month.

So what does containment mean, and why is it so hard to achieve?

“Containment means that there’s some type of barrier between the area that has been burned, which we call ‘the black’ and an area that has not been burned, which we refer to as ‘the green,'” says Cal Fire public information officer Jaime Williams.

The “percent contained” indicates how much of the fire’s perimeter is surrounded by a barrier. So, for a fire whose perimeter is 10 miles around, if firefighters create a 5-mile-long dirt area around the fire, the fire is 50 percent contained.

Several songs in this week’s episode are from Petaluma artist Gio Benedetti. He created them as the wildfires were burning, and proceeds from their sale are being donated to the Sonoma County Fire Disaster Relief Fund. Find them on his website.

There are two types of barriers: natural and artificial. A stream or lake can act as a natural barrier, and an artificial barrier is often a dirt path dug around the fire. Firefighters will use a bulldozer to create what is called a “dozer line,” or manually carve out a path using picks and shovels, which is called a “hand line.”

“They basically scrape the top layer of the grass off to leave bare mineral soil,” Williams says. “That way the fire stops because there’s nothing to burn.”

Or firefighters will employ a “hose lay,” where they’ll carry a synthetic hose around the fire, periodically spraying the area inside “the black.”

And then a fire can go from 50 percent contained to 20 percent contained.

Even after a fire is contained, there’s still a lot of work to do.

A contained fire can still be flaming inside the perimeter and firefighters must burn out untouched vegetation inside the barrier and cool down hot spots that could flare up. After the hot spots and unburned vegetation are treated and the barrier is expected to hold, a fire is considered “controlled.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EzcA3KvEsY

How do wildfires get their names?

The first fire crew on the scene typically names the fire. Usually, they’re inspired by a nearby landmark like a road, mountain, lake or town.

The Tubbs Fire that destroyed parts of Santa Rosa started near Tubbs Lane, just north of Calistoga. The Atlas Fire in Napa was named for Atlas Peak, a nearby mountain.

But the naming process isn’t always that simple. Since January, there have been more than 6,000 fires in California, which is a lot of fires to name.

Two years ago, firefighters in Idaho were facing their 57th fire of the season and couldn’t come up with a creative name for the fire. So, they named it Not Creative Fire.

Fire names also often include the word “complex,” like the Nuns Complex Fire. That means there are two or more individual fires located in the same general area, and it has been assigned to a unified command.

How does California pay for wildfires?

Most fires are relatively small — less than 10 acres — and funding to fight them comes from Cal Fire’s regular operating budget. But major fires — like the ones burning in Northern California — are paid for out of the Emergency Wildland Fire Suppression Fund. Often referred to as the Emergency Fund, it was established decades ago specifically to cover the extraordinary costs associated with fighting catastrophic fires.

Since the beginning of July, Cal Fire has spent more than $387 million of its $426.9 million emergency fund for the 2017-2018 fiscal year, intended to last until next June. $125 million of that has been spent since Oct. 9, when the fires started burning throughout Northern California. If the emergency fund runs out, Cal Fire can ask for additional funds from the state’s more than $1.4 billion budget reserve.

But that solves only part of the problem.

About a third of California is federal land, where fire response and prevention fall mostly to the U.S. Forest Service. It doesn’t have an emergency fund. All Forest Service fire funds come from its base operating budget, so when firefighting costs shoot skyward as they have over the last several years, resources have to be cribbed from other budget lines, like fire prevention and forest health, in a system called “fire borrowing.”

“So real work on the ground to reduce the intensity of fires isn’t getting done or is being delayed,” says Ken Pimlott, the director of Cal Fire. “It really just further exacerbates the intensity of fires because we can’t get on the federal ground in particular to get the fuels treated.”

The Forest Service has already spent a record-breaking $2 billion-plus on fire suppression this year, and it estimates that it will have to transfer more than a half-billion dollars from other Forest Service programs to cover fire response for the year.

Pimlott has been lobbying for years to establish an emergency fund for the Forest Service, and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris support current legislation that would prevent the need for fire borrowing.

Since 2011, Cal Fire’s prevention and forest health programs have been funded by a fee on homeowners who live on lands where firefighting falls mainly to the state, and starting this year, they’ll be funded by revenues from California’s cap-and-trade program, in which industry pays for the right to produce greenhouse gases (the link being that burning of fossil fuels is deemed a contributor to global warming and hence to more intense wildfires).

]]>What does containment mean? How are wildfires named? What happens after your house burns?What does containment mean? How are wildfires named? What happens after your house burns?<br />
<br />
Reported by Lindsey Hoshaw, Jessica Placzek, Sukey Lewis and Olivia Allen-Price. Technical director is Paul Lancour. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Many songs in this episode were by Petaluma artist Gio Benedetti, and proceeds from their sale will benefit wildfire survivors. Find and buy his music here: https://giobenedetti.bandcamp.com/<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED14:02What are the Mysterious Brick Circles in San Francisco Intersections?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/10/12/what-are-the-mysterious-brick-circles-in-san-francisco-intersections/
Thu, 12 Oct 2017 16:00:34 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11622273They're a reminder of the city's early history, and still have a practical use today.Spend some time walking around San Francisco, and you’ll probably notice the large brick circles decorating the pavement at some intersections. They can be found all over the city.

Over the years, Bay Curious has received dozens of questions about these mysterious circles. The latest one came from listener Matthew Cross.

Turns out, those circles date back to the mid-1800s, and they mark huge underground tanks, or cisterns, that hold water to fight fires.

There are more than 170 cisterns scattered throughout San Francisco. And some hold as much water as two backyard swimming pools, says Katie Miller, the city’s water division manager.

The city just finished building 30 new cisterns, many of them in places where there weren’t any, or where they could be key in stopping fires from spreading. Each costs about $1 million.

“So if you think about it, that’s about the cost of a really nice new home,” says Miller. “It’s about the size of a new home, too. It can be a nice bunker for somebody.”

But why does the city need these underground tanks to fight fires? For that question, Scott Kildall is the one to ask.

He’s an artist who has lived in San Francisco for years, and he designed a map with the locations of each cistern. This mapping process turned him into a sort of cistern history buff.

“I’m not a historian,” he says, “but I’ve become a historian about cisterns.”

Kildall begins the story in 1848, when San Francisco was a bunch of tents, housing a little less than a thousand people. Then, in 1849, gold was discovered and thousands rushed into the city. In just one year, the city grew to about 25 times its size, to at least 20,000 residents.

Demand for housing skyrocketed and a building frenzy followed. Most homes were built out of wood, but the wood made for perfect kindling. In the 1850s, the city saw six big fires, which came to be known as the Great Fires.

The devastation from the fires spurred the city to act.

“People are like, ‘Oh no, what are we going to do. We got to do something about this,’ ” Kildall says.

But at that time, he says, there was no way to lay out water mains and pipes. So, city leaders built 16 underground cisterns around San Francisco to store water for firefighting. The very first was a 12,000-gallon cistern in Portsmouth Square.

They also bought some fire engines pulled by horses, and set up a paid position for a fire chief. There was even an ordinance passed that required each family to have six buckets of water in their house — just in case.

As the city grew, more cisterns were installed. But the city also started to install water pipes and hydrants. By the end of the 1800s, residents had full faith in their new water system, and the cisterns stopped being maintained.

It struck on the morning of April 18, and shook the city for about a minute. Windows were smashed and chimneys caved in. Even a train was thrown off its tracks. The damage was incredible. Three-quarters of the city was gone, 3,000 people died and about 200,000 were left homeless.

But most of the damage wasn’t from the earthquake itself — it was from the three days of fires that followed. Since the quake broke a lot of the city’s water pipes, most fire hydrants quickly ran out of water or stopped working entirely.

“You can see that people didn’t think they’re actually useful until they were useful, and they said, ‘Oh that’s a really good idea,’ ” Kildall points out.

Kildall offered to take me on a tour of the cisterns in San Francisco’s Chinatown. We visited about 10 cisterns, but not all of them had the brick rings. Kildall didn’t know why, but Deputy Fire Chief Tony Rivera took a guess.

“The roads have been repaved so many times, there probably is an original brick circle somewhere deep under there,” says Rivera.

Rivera is a fan of the red brick circle, although he says they come in two other designs: a double circle and a square. The designs aren’t as important anymore for helping firefighters find the cisterns. Now, he says, they use GPS. So these days, the circles just serve as decoration.

As for the cisterns underneath those designs, they haven’t been used since the 1906 earthquake more than a century ago. But they are down there, just in case, ready to save the city when the next earthquake strikes.

]]>They're a reminder of the city's early history, and still have a practical use today.Spend some time walking around San Francisco, and you'll probably notice the large, brick circles decorating the pavement at some intersections. What are they for?<br />
<br />
Reported by Sarah Craig. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED9:34How San Francisco’s Drag Royalty Does Good, While Looking Fiercehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/10/05/the-imperial-court-raises-serious-money-while-playing-dress-up/
Thu, 05 Oct 2017 10:00:33 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11620555How an S.F. drag artist founded one of the biggest and most bejeweled charities dedicated to LGBTQ causes.San Francisco has always been the sort of place where people come to reinvent themselves in a big way. The trend goes back to Joshua Norton, the eccentric wheeler-dealer who declared himself emperor of the United States in 1859.

When San Francisco drag queen and political activist José Sarria declared himself the “Empress José I, The Widow Norton,” in 1965, he wasn’t just having fun with Norton’s legacy.

As the founder of The Imperial Court, Sarria launched and presided over an entire movement that would not only support LGBTQ causes in a profound way over the more than five decades of its existence to date, but would also do it with lashings of bejeweled and sequined flair.

Learn about The Imperial Court in this episode of Bay Curious.

Ten things to know about The Imperial Court:

From its roots in 1960s San Francisco, today’s Imperial Court extends to around 70 chapters across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

The San Francisco chapter raises between $50,000-$100,000 each year for a wide range of charities, including San Francisco Suicide Prevention and the Gay-Straight Alliance.

For nearly three decades until it shuttered in 2013, Marlena’s, a bar in Hayes Valley, was “ground zero” for Imperial Court activities in San Francisco.

The Imperial Court elects a new emperor and empress every February. Candidates run their election campaigns for about a month leading up to the election date.

The results of the election are announced at the annual coronation, which is held at San Francisco’s Design Center these days.

There have been 52 empresses and 45 emperors to date.

Most Imperial Court royals hold down day jobs in addition to working hard weekends on behalf of The Imperial Court. Their main role is to raise money for their selected charities by helping out at events in their hometowns and further afield.

As “The Mother Court,” the San Francisco chapter is the most prestigious of the courts within the system.

The Imperial Court is connected to several other LGBTQ organizations, including the Ducal Court and the Mr. and Miss Gay pageants.

Sarria died at the age of 90 in 2013 and received a stately funeral at Grace Cathedral. He is buried next to Emperor Norton in Colma’s Woodlawn Cemetery. The royal couple’s graves are surrounded by those of other key Imperial Court royals.

https://youtu.be/QlyQqnBEFYg

]]>How an S.F. drag artist founded one of the biggest and most bejeweled charities dedicated to LGBTQ causes.How an S.F. drag artist founded one of the biggest and most bejeweled charities dedicated to LGBTQ causes. <br />
<br />
Reported by Chloe Veltman. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Paul Lancour, Jessica Placzek, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQED12:54Their Country Hated Them, But They Fought for It Anywayhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/09/28/their-country-hated-them-but-they-fought-for-it-anyway/
Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:20:44 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11619460Meet the Japanese-American combat unit that fought fearlessly during World War II, in spite of it all.Bay Curious listener Marcy Ballard wrote to us wanting to know more about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team — a segregated, Japanese-American unit that fought for the U.S. during the Second World War.

She’s pretty sure they must have some remarkable stories to tell.

After all, these were men considered to be enemy aliens by the government because of their Japanese heritage. Offensive Anti-Japanese propaganda was circling everywhere. Many were forced to live in internment camps, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. And yet, they volunteered to fight for America.

Soon after, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was created. Its Japanese-American members proved themselves to be valiant soldiers.

They took control of strategically important towns in France, and aided in the liberation of Rome. They broke stalwart German defenses, and discovered and freed prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp. They were regularly sent to the front lines to fight in some of the war’s bloodiest battles.

Some have said they were chosen to fight in these battles because their superiors considered them expendable. But few have questioned their heroism.

By the end of the war, the team had earned over 18,000 awards, including 21 Medals of Honor and over 9,000 Purple Hearts — making the 442nd the most decorated military unit of its size in U.S. history.

Learn more about the 442nd and hear stories from two members in this week’s Bay Curious episode, which you can play at the top of this article.

]]>Meet the Japanese-American combat unit that fought fearlessly during World War II, in spite of it all.
She’s pretty sure they must have some remarkable stories to tell.

After all, these were men considered to be enemy aliens by the government because of their Japanese heritage. Offensive Anti-Japanese propaganda was circling everywhere. Many were forced to live in internment camps, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. And yet, they volunteered to fight for America.

Soon after, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was created. Its Japanese-American members proved themselves to be valiant soldiers.

They took control of strategically important towns in France, and aided in the liberation of Rome. They broke stalwart German defenses, and discovered and freed prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp. They were regularly sent to the front lines to fight in some of the war's bloodiest battles.

Some have said they were chosen to fight in these battles because their superiors considered them expendable. But few have questioned their heroism.

By the end of the war, the team had earned over 18,000 awards, including 21 Medals of Honor and over 9,000 Purple Hearts -- making the 442nd the most decorated military unit of its size in U.S. history.

Learn more about the 442nd and hear stories from two members in this week's Bay Curious episode, which you can play at the top of this article.

]]>KQEDcleanQuake Prep: BART’s Tunnel Plan and the Muni Bus That Could Save Youhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/09/21/quake-prep-barts-tunnel-plan-and-the-muni-bus-that-could-save-you/
Thu, 21 Sep 2017 10:00:45 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11618056After the big one: From getting people out of the Transbay Tube to shuttling injured people in a converted Muni bus.Picture a set of binoculars — only a pair the size of a low-rise building. That’s the shape of BART’s Transbay Tube — the dual-bore, 3.8-mile passageway that connects the West Oakland Station to San Francisco’s Embarcadero Station. Every weekday during peak commute hours, more than 60,000 BART riders cruise through the tube. What most don’t know is that they’re in a trench on the floor of San Francisco Bay.

Bay Curious listener Jennifer Schulz rides through the tube a lot and can’t help but to think: What if there was an earthquake? How safe is the Transbay Tube? Would it crack? Would bay water flood into my jam-packed BART car? Could I be trapped?

Since 2005, BART has been undergoing a major earthquake retrofit. The final phase is expected to begin next year, finishing up some time in 2023. The cost? So far, $1.3 billion.

What I can say is that it’s safer than most other places people are going to be in their working day. I mean, some of the buildings downtown are obviously built to very modern standards and can survive a large earthquake. But most of the buildings in the Bay Area probably would be collapsing in the size earthquake we’re talking about.

Walk us through what happens if there is an earthquake.

First, we reduce the speed of the train down to 27 mph, which gives an operator plenty of time to see what’s in front of him, and see if there’s any cracking or anything of that nature. But our goal is to not stop in the Transbay Tube. If for some reason folks have to exit the train, we have protocols in place to do that.

What would happen? Would it leak?

The tube does get leaks every now and then, as all tunnels do. And BART actually has an active program to plug those leaks when they happen. During the earthquake we expect that the earthquake forces will cause the liner to crack and then you’ll get leakage. Now the tunnel doesn’t collapse. The tunnels are plenty strong enough to stay up. But if you get too much leakage, it fills with water and that’s what we’re trying to prevent.

So if it did crack, can it fill with water and flood?

We have a pumping system. Part of the retrofit is to increase the size of that pumping system so you can at least slow down the rate of fill. The idea is that you can slow it down enough so that people can get out well before the tube floods.

So it sounds like you’d almost want to be in the tube? That it’s safer than other areas?

Unless it’s a very, very large earthquake you’d probably want to be in the tube. Now we talked about the flooding problem. So if you’re in an earthquake that large it would be problematic, but then so is everywhere else in the Bay Area. So it’s kind of a wash, if you will.

To hear more from Tom Horton and the safety of the Transbay Tube, listen to the full episode of Bay Curious at the top of this article.

A Response Plan, Ready and Waiting

All that talk about earthquakes got us thinking — what if something catastrophic did happen in the Bay Area? After the big one, it’s not going to be easy for anyone to get around. So what will happen to people who really need medical care?

Reporter Eli Wirtschafter learned about one unusual tool San Francisco has to address that problem: old Muni buses that have been turned into giant ambulances.

The idea was first used on New Year’s Eve 2010, when big celebrations were planned at the Embarcadero. To provide extra medical support, the San Francisco Fire Department borrowed a 40-foot Muni bus and turned it into a makeshift mobile clinic, treating people who might have partied a little too hard.

From that time on, the idea of having a bus-sized ambulance “just stayed with us,” says Andy Zanoff, chief paramedic for the Fire Department.

“Mass casualty ambulances” exist, but new ones can cost around half a million dollars.

In 2015, Muni donated two old buses it was taking out of service. Muni engineers converted the buses into ambulances over the course of six weeks, using kits purchased from a Virginia company. The project cost the city $79,000, and was supplemented by $67,000 from the Department of Homeland Security — in all, far less expensive than buying the ambulances new.

The buses are the size and shape of standard Muni buses, but inside is a different story. Most of the seats have been replaced by stretchers stacked three high. They’re also fully stocked with medical equipment, like oxygen supply gear, gloves, shears and bandages.

Each bus can carry up to 22 patients in all — 10 in ordinary bus seats, and 12 on the stretchers.

Although the buses lack sirens, they would travel with a police escort. In the event of a large-scale emergency, “the buses can be ready to roll in less than 30 minutes,” says Zanoff.

Thirty minutes may seem like a long time to wait, but the buses have largely been used for pre-planned events, like Halloween in the Castro or during Fleet Week.

But emergency medical services chief Tony Molloy says one of the ambu-buses’ most important jobs is to be ready in case there’s an unplanned incident.

Molloy says during a major natural disaster, the ambu-buses could evacuate patients from a hospital that became unsafe. Or if the roads to hospitals become inaccessible, the buses could serve as mobile hospitals for disaster victims.

]]>After the big one: From getting people out of the Transbay Tube to shuttling injured people in a converted Muni bus.
Bay Curious listener Jennifer Schulz rides through the tube a lot and can't help but to think: What if there was an earthquake? How safe is the Transbay Tube? Would it crack? Would bay water flood into my jam-packed BART car? Could I be trapped?

Since 2005, BART has been undergoing a major earthquake retrofit. The final phase is expected to begin next year, finishing up some time in 2023. The cost? So far, $1.3 billion.

What I can say is that it’s safer than most other places people are going to be in their working day. I mean, some of the buildings downtown are obviously built to very modern standards and can survive a large earthquake. But most of the buildings in the Bay Area probably would be collapsing in the size earthquake we're talking about.

Walk us through what happens if there is an earthquake.

First, we reduce the speed of the train down to 27 mph, which gives an operator plenty of time to see what's in front of him, and see if there's any cracking or anything of that nature. But our goal is to not stop in the Transbay Tube. If for some reason folks have to exit the train, we have protocols in place to do that.

What would happen? Would it leak?

The tube does get leaks every now and then, as all tunnels do. And BART actually has an active program to plug those leaks when they happen. During the earthquake we expect that the earthquake forces will cause the liner to crack and then you’ll get leakage. Now the tunnel doesn't collapse. The tunnels are plenty strong enough to stay up. But if you get too much leakage, it fills with water and that's what we're trying to prevent.

So if it did crack, can it fill with water and flood?

We have a pumping system. Part of the retrofit is to increase the size of that pumping system so you can at least slow down the rate of fill. The idea is that you can slow it down enough so that people can get out well before the tube floods.

So it sounds like you'd almost want to be in the tube? That it's safer than other areas?

Unless it's a very, very large earthquake you'd probably want to be in the tube. Now we talked about the flooding problem. So if you're in an earthquake that large it would be problematic, but then so is everywhere else in the Bay Area. So it's kind of a wash, if you will.

To hear more from Tom Horton and the safety of the Transbay Tube, listen to the full episode of Bay Curious at the top of this article.

A Response Plan, Ready and Waiting
All that talk about earthquakes got us thinking -- what if something catastrophic did happen in the Bay Area? After the big one, it's not going to be easy for anyone to get around. So what will happen to people who really need medical care?

Reporter Eli Wirtschafter learned about one unusual tool San Francisco has to address that problem: old Muni buses that have been turned into giant ambulances.

The idea was first used on New Year’s Eve 2010, when big celebrations were planned at the Embarcadero. To provide extra medical support, the San Francisco Fire Department borrowed a 40-foot Muni bus and turned it into a makeshift mobile clinic, treating people who might have partied a little too hard.

]]>KQEDcleanHistory of the Berkeley Pier: A Ferry Talehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/09/14/history-of-the-berkeley-pier-a-ferry-tale/
Thu, 14 Sep 2017 08:10:20 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10677697What's the story behind this super-long pier that once nearly stretched from Berkeley to Treasure Island?For years Martin Kunz has been looking down the hill from his office at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, out over the water, at one of the longest piers in California — the Berkeley Pier.

“I see this every day from my office when I have lunch, and I was curious what the history behind this is,” he said. He submitted a question to Bay Curious, so off we went to find the answer.

Lately, the Berkeley Pier has primarily been used as a fishing pier, but decades ago it had a very different purpose.

Berkeley’s Population Boom

Back in the early 20th century, Berkeley was growing fast. Its population went from 13,214 residents in 1900 to 56,036 in 1920. Thousands of refugees from San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake found homes in Berkeley, the University of California experienced rapid expansion and an electric train system connected Berkeley to other Bay Area cities, such as Oakland.

Berkeley was establishing itself as an urban center, yet many of its residents still worked jobs in San Francisco. To get there, workers commuted by train to Oakland and then by boat to San Francisco — an inconvenient journey that makes today’s commute look like a cakewalk. So, in 1926, the Golden Gate Ferry Co. began building a pier that would bring auto ferries to Berkeley.

When the construction was finished, the dock was 3½ miles long, making it one of the longest piers in the state. Why so long? Parts of San Francisco Bay are very shallow. Underneath the pier, the water is between 7 and 9 feet deep. The pier needed to reach parts of the bay where the water was deep enough for a ferry to travel.

“A longer dock also meant that the ferry company saved a lot of money. In other words, you had to drive all the way out to the end of the pier and use your gas instead of them using gas for the ferry,” says Chuck Wollenberg, professor of history at Berkeley City College.

Ferry service began at the pier in 1929. The three boats were named Golden Bear, Golden Poppy and Golden Shore.

Car Talk

The 1920s saw tremendous growth in the number of Americans driving personal automobiles. Ford’s assembly line made cars more affordable, and it wasn’t long before cars surpassed trains in popularity. After all, this was a time when Republicans claimed that Republican prosperity had brought “a chicken in every pot. And a car in every backyard.”

As more cars hit the road, more cars relied on the ferries at the Berkeley Pier, and lines could be long. Whenever Stanford played football against Cal at UC Berkeley, lines would stretch beyond the 3½ miles of pier.

“The mother of all traffic jams in the Bay Area occurred at the end of the Labor Day weekend,” says Wollenberg. “There was a four-hour wait. When people tried to cut in, people would take out revolvers and threaten people.”

But the same thing that created demand for the ferries also brought about the dock’s demise. With the rising popularity of cars, California legislators decided to create a bridge between Alameda County and San Francisco. The same year the ferries started running, engineers began laying plans for the Bay Bridge.

The Bay Bridge opened on Nov. 12, 1936. Former President Herbert Hoover watched as California Gov. Frank Merriam cut the ceremonial chain opening the bridge . The Golden Gate Ferry Co. would last only two more years, eventually calling it quits and giving the pier to the city of Berkeley. In total, the Berkeley auto ferries had run less than 10 years.

After the Bridge

Berkeley officials used state and city funds to convert the pier into a recreation area. It opened in spring 1938 and in the first year attracted 50,000 people. The Berkeley Recreation Department charged an admission fee of 10 cents for pedestrians and 25 cents for automobiles.

Fishing became a popular pastime on the pier and kids were encouraged to learn. Civic leaders in the ’40s and ’50s even suggested that fishing on the pier could reduce juvenile delinquency in the area.

Soon, city officials found that maintaining miles of pier could be difficult and expensive. The corrosive effects of salt water took their toll on the dock, and over time sections of pier would be closed, repaired, reopened and then closed again.

The Berkeley Marina was also built out over the pier, cutting the pier down to about 2½ miles.

The farthest sections of the pier, which reach nearly to Treasure Island, have been abandoned for decades. Much of the wood has rotted away, so only the cement pilings are left. Sailors have blamed the decaying pier for sinking at least two ships, while fishermen have claimed it creates a fertile breeding ground for marine life.

Oakland resident Phillip Jwell is a longtime fisherman who has enjoyed the pier for years. Cast a line off the pier and you can pull in rays, perch, bass, halibut and even small sharks.

“Fishing is a good meditation. It clears your mind and actually helps you out better throughout the week,” says Jwell.

When the pier is open Jwell says, “It’s about 75 people out there fishing usually on a good average.”

The Pier at Present

Now the future of the pier is looking uncertain. In July of 2015, Berkeley officials closed the entire pier after finding considerable structural damage.

The city hasn’t been clear about when or if the Berkeley Pier will open again. Repairs could be expensive and funding has been difficult in the past. It could take years.

]]>What's the story behind this super-long pier that once nearly stretched from Berkeley to Treasure Island?
“I see this every day from my office when I have lunch, and I was curious what the history behind this is,” he said. He submitted a question to Bay Curious, so off we went to find the answer.

Lately, the Berkeley Pier has primarily been used as a fishing pier, but decades ago it had a very different purpose.
Berkeley's Population Boom
Back in the early 20th century, Berkeley was growing fast. Its population went from 13,214 residents in 1900 to 56,036 in 1920. Thousands of refugees from San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake found homes in Berkeley, the University of California experienced rapid expansion and an electric train system connected Berkeley to other Bay Area cities, such as Oakland.

Berkeley was establishing itself as an urban center, yet many of its residents still worked jobs in San Francisco. To get there, workers commuted by train to Oakland and then by boat to San Francisco -- an inconvenient journey that makes today's commute look like a cakewalk. So, in 1926, the Golden Gate Ferry Co. began building a pier that would bring auto ferries to Berkeley.

When the construction was finished, the dock was 3½ miles long, making it one of the longest piers in the state. Why so long? Parts of San Francisco Bay are very shallow. Underneath the pier, the water is between 7 and 9 feet deep. The pier needed to reach parts of the bay where the water was deep enough for a ferry to travel.

“A longer dock also meant that the ferry company saved a lot of money. In other words, you had to drive all the way out to the end of the pier and use your gas instead of them using gas for the ferry,” says Chuck Wollenberg, professor of history at Berkeley City College.

Ferry service began at the pier in 1929. The three boats were named Golden Bear, Golden Poppy and Golden Shore.

Car Talk
The 1920s saw tremendous growth in the number of Americans driving personal automobiles. Ford’s assembly line made cars more affordable, and it wasn't long before cars surpassed trains in popularity. After all, this was a time when Republicans claimed that Republican prosperity had brought "a chicken in every pot. And a car in every backyard."

As more cars hit the road, more cars relied on the ferries at the Berkeley Pier, and lines could be long. Whenever Stanford played football against Cal at UC Berkeley, lines would stretch beyond the 3½ miles of pier.

“The mother of all traffic jams in the Bay Area occurred at the end of the Labor Day weekend," says Wollenberg. "There was a four-hour wait. When people tried to cut in, people would take out revolvers and threaten people."

But the same thing that created demand for the ferries also brought about the dock's demise. With the rising popularity of cars, California legislators decided to create a bridge between Alameda County and San Francisco. The same year the ferries started running, engineers began laying plans for the Bay Bridge.

The Bay Bridge opened on Nov. 12, 1936. Former President Herbert Hoover watched as California Gov. Frank Merriam cut the ceremonial chain opening the bridge . The Golden Gate Ferry Co. would last only two more years, eventually calling it quits and giving the pier to the city of Berkeley. In total, the Berkeley auto ferries had run less than 10 years.

After the Bridge
Berkeley officials used state and city funds to convert the pier into a recreation area. It opened in spring 1938 and in the first year attracted 50,000 people. The Berkeley Recreation Department charged an admission fee of 10 cents for pedestrians and 25 cents for automobiles.

]]>KQEDcleanParking After the Street Sweeper Passes: Legal or Not?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/08/31/can-you-park-after-the-street-cleaner-has-gone-by/
Thu, 31 Aug 2017 10:00:54 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11614704There's one 'no parking' sign in San Francisco that you can bend the rules on ... if the conditions are right.If you live or work in San Francisco, you know landing a 12-hour parking spot on the street is one of those little victories of daily life. It means you don’t have to run out and move your car every couple of hours to avoid the parking ticket. And you don’t have to slink into the parking garage, defeated in your search for a free spot on the street.

It’s a few more bucks in your pocket.

But how much risk is that small victory worth?

Ashley Ortiz asked Bay Curious: “If you see a street cleaner come through on a street cleaning day, can you park on the block before the end of the NO PARKING time frame that’s posted?”

In the interest of all parking scofflaws and saints, we set out to find the official answer.

Walking The Parking Enforcement Beat

I made my way to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, where I met up with traffic enforcement officer Denise Golden. She’s funny, smart and 100 percent no-nonsense.

She says that while people with her job may not be the most well-liked, “without us, it would be chaos. People would never move their vehicles. It would be definitely a problem.”

I asked her Ashley’s question and her answer surprised me.

“Once the street sweeper has gone by, we do permit the vehicle to park curbside,” she says.

Signs Got You Stumped?

Golden went on to say that, in many cases, street cleaning is a four-step process. So, even if you think you’ve seen the street sweeper go by, you may have actually seen another vehicle.

The Street Sweeping Process

The first vehicle in the street cleaning parade is the broom support truck. A worker picks up large items off the street – things like big pieces of wood or an abandoned chair — and chucks them into this truck. They’re looking for anything that cannot be vacuumed up by the street sweeper.

Next comes the street flusher, which is used mostly on commercial streets like Market and Mission. The flusher has jets underneath the truck that shoot water on the roadway, loosening grime and grit.

Third in line is the parking ticket officer, citing cars that haven’t moved.

Finally, the street sweeper comes along with big brushes and a large tube that vacuums up all the remaining trash on the street.

After that final step, you can legally park.

You’re welcome.

Wait, Four Steps? Really?

I caught a ride one morning with John Sheehan, one of the city’s street sweepers, as he cleaned his route in Noe Valley. He was surprised to hear I’d been told street cleaning is a four-step process.

On his route, he said, it’s usually a two-step process: The parking enforcement person moves ahead of him and then he alone cleans the street.

Turns out the cleaning process changes based on a variety of factors, like which street is being cleaned, which district the street is in, time of year, if there are special events and what’s been requested.

But whether it’s a two-step or four-step process, the bottom line is: Wait for that ticket buggy and street sweeper to roll by and you’re in the clear.

]]>There's one 'no parking' sign in San Francisco that you can bend the rules on ... if the conditions are right.There's one "no parking" sign in San Francisco that you can bend the rules on ... if the conditions are right.<br />
<br />
Reported by Penny Nelson. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Paul Lancour, Jessica Placzek, Penny Nelson, Suzie Racho and Katie McMurran. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean6:38The History of Nudity in San Francisco Uncoveredhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/08/24/the-history-of-nudity-in-san-francisco-uncovered/
Thu, 24 Aug 2017 17:55:52 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11613510Whether at Baker Beach or the Bay to Breakers, it’s not unusual to see public nudity in San Francisco.In San Francisco you’ll see naked people on bike rides, lounging on Baker Beach, running in the Bay to Breakers or walking around at the Folsom Street Fair.

A few years ago Bay Curious listener Kelly Hardesty was walking in the Castro with her daughter when they saw a naked man, who wore nothing but white tennis shoes. Her daughter said, “Mommy, Mommy he’s naked.” She replied, “Yeah, he is.”

Kelly didn’t want to make a big deal about it, since it wasn’t exactly the most unusual sight in the city, but then a mailman looked at her and said, “I remember when I first started my route, and that used to shock me, too, but now I don’t think anything of it.”

That got Kelly wondering:

“Is it legal to be naked in San Francisco … and if so, has it always been that way?”

The state of California has incident exposure laws, making it illegal if someone is naked with the intent of being sexual (like masturbating in public), or intentionally offensive (like flashing someone). If you’re just hanging out naked minding your own business, California leaves that up to local governments.

Getting Closer to Nature

For the first half of the 20th century, San Francisco didn’t have public nudity laws. In that era, local people weren’t walking around nude much, so it was a non-issue. But then the ’60s arrived, and many saw nudity as a form of political, artistic or personal expression.

College students streaked across the nation. In San Francisco, hippie culture was thriving, and Golden Gate Park became a favorite spot for nudists looking to get closer to nature. According to police patrolling the area, there was also a decent amount of public sex.

“It wasn’t uncommon for a gal to come out of the bushes there in the Panhandle without a damn stitch and stand right in front of you with her hands up,” said Thomas J. Cahill, who was chief of police at the time. “I was out in the park and two started going to it on the lawn beside me.”

Of course, sex is sexual, and thus already illegal according to California law. But conservative San Franciscans wanted tougher laws to prevent this kind of behavior, and they eventually got public nudity banned in the parks.

Outside of the parks, nudity wasn’t regulated and considered fair game.

Bans Up and Down the Bay

As time passed, nearby cities made public nudity illegal — among them, San Jose and Berkeley.

Berkeley is interesting because its ban is mostly due to one naked guy — Andrew Martinez was a student at UC Berkeley. He believed that society was sexually repressed and, to address this, he decided to undress. He went to classes, parties and did errands wearing nothing but a pair of sandals and a backpack.

Among his fellow students he was known as “the Naked Guy.” In 1992, the university implemented a dress code policy and found Martinez in violation of it. When he showed up naked to his disciplinary hearing, he was expelled.

Martinez stayed in Berkeley, continuing to walk around nude. But then in 1993, the City Council decided to discuss whether public nudity should be allowed. When Martinez showed up naked to speak against it, he was flanked by nude friends. The council was sufficiently offended and voted to make public nudity a misdemeanor crime.

San Francisco in the Buff

Back in San Francisco, nudists were enjoying their time in the sun. The city developed a reputation for bodies in the buff. Especially at certain public events like the Folsom Street Fair, a leather fetish festival, and the Bay To Breakers, a rambunctious 12K race.

Rich Pasco, coordinator of the Bay Area Naturists, a nudist group, has been running in the race since 1998.

“We are a group of people who believe that the human body is God’s divine creation, nothing to be ashamed of, and that our interaction with Mother Nature is enhanced by removing the barrier of clothing,” Pasco says.

He says it wasn’t just public events where people could let it all hang out. There were nudity-approved beaches, and certain neighborhoods where nudists would congregate.

“There were a group of people in San Francisco who thought going to Jane Warner Plaza would be a good idea. It’s a little urban park, and this urban park became an urban nude beach,” he says.

The Wiener Bill

But the tides of the urban nude beach began to change in 2011 when then-Supervisor Scott Wiener began focusing on “quality of life” issues.

Wiener started off by trying to ban nudity in restaurants and requiring naked people to put a buffer between themselves and public seating — like sitting on a newspaper when riding the bus.

But Wiener didn’t stop there. He felt the men in Jane Warner Plaza were still taking it too far by wearing genital jewelry designed to maintain erections.

“I just don’t buy the freedom of expression argument here,” said Wiener in an interview with KQED Forum at the time. “Freedom of expression is not about taking your pants off at Castro and Market and showing your genitals to passing traffic and pedestrians. That’s not freedom of expression.”

To prevent this, Wiener wrote up a bill banning public nudity on streets, plazas, sidewalks and on public transit, though there was a blanket exemption for street fairs and festivals, and no impact on nude beaches.

Wiener’s campaign received coverage from national news outlets. While some people supported the ban, others felt it was unnecessary.

A KQED listener at the time said, “We do have laws already that enforce lewd behavior. Castro has always been an adult neighborhood. We have smoke shops, porn stores, probably 15 gay bars alone …”

Longtime residents felt the proposed nudity ban was due to demographic shifts and catered to the new wealthier residents, some who had children and wanted a more family-friendly atmosphere.

Obviously, the nudists were not fans of Wiener’s proposal. There were a number of public meetings about the ban, where nudists made their thoughts known, sometimes by taking their clothes off in opposition. Among the most vocal was longtime nudist Oxane “Gypsy” Taub.

Taub had a public access television show where she and her interviewees were always naked.

“People say that somehow public nudity hurts children. I would say to the contrary. Because children who grew up without ever seeing a naked body grow up extremely insecure about their own body because all they see is commercials and porn,” Taub said.

Life After the Ban

Despite nudist activists like Taub, the anti-nudity bill, also called the Wiener bill, was passed in November 2012 by a 6-5 vote. It became illegal to show your genitals, perineum or anal region in public.

According to the new law, the first violation is a $100 fine, the second a $200 fine and the third violation results in either jail time “not to exceed one year” or a fine “not to exceed $500”.

There were some loopholes. To appease people concerned about events like the Bay to Breakers and the Folsom Street Fair, the bill says that the ban does not apply to permitted events like parades, fairs and festivals. So as long as the event organizers don’t mind, you should be able to be nude at any permitted event.

However, it didn’t exactly work out like that. Taub says she ran into trouble when she applied to get permits for nude-specific events after the ban took place.

“When we went and applied for parade permits, we were denied over 20 times,” Taub says. “Every single one of them was either ignored or denied, every time with a new flimsy excuse.”

Taub and other nudists lawyered up, and filed a complaint against the San Francisco Police Department for infringing on their First Amendment rights.

The nudists also held nude protests against the ban, and Taub even got married nude on the steps of City Hall, after which she was arrested. She says she was arrested about seven or eight times in the first year of the ban. The district attorney never imprisoned Taub for her nude protests. In 2015, a federal judge ordered the city to give a permit to the nudists for a parade.

“I mean it’s still not as good as having public nudity be legal, which is our goal, but it’s way better than what we had before, where we couldn’t even have an event without everybody being arrested or cited,” Taub says.

Today, you need a permit to get fully naked in San Francisco. Or, if you’re not into paperwork, you can always go to a nude-approved park, like the north end of Baker Beach, where the National Park Service has said it’s legal to be naked.

]]>Whether at Baker Beach or the Bay to Breakers, it’s not unusual to see public nudity in San Francisco.Whether at Baker Beach or Bay to Breakers, it’s not unusual to see public nudity in San Francisco. What are the current laws on the matter, and how did the city become known for bodies in the buff?<br />
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Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson and Julia McEvoy. Our managing editor is Ethan Lindsey. Vice President for News is Holly Kernan. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean11:21Rusty Navy: The Bay Area’s ‘Mothball Fleet’ Enters a New Erahttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/08/17/rusty-navy-the-bay-areas-mothball-fleet-enters-a-new-era/
Thu, 17 Aug 2017 10:00:44 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11612408Clusters of old military ships are anchored side by side in Suisun Bay. Most of them are decades old.UPDATED on Nov. 21, 2017

If you’ve driven on I-680, across the Benicia–Martinez Bridge, you’ve probably seen them.

Clusters of old military ships are anchored side by side in Suisun Bay. Most of them are decades old. Their gray hulls are spotted with rust. Much of their paint has faded, or flaked away. Their decks are eerily deserted — no modern equipment, no sailors. They look abandoned, and on a foggy day, maybe even haunted.

Most people call this the Ghost Fleet, or Mothball Fleet — but its official name is the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet.

Bay Curious listener Steve Yeager has been wondering about the fleet since he was a kid. He still passes the ships on his weekly commute.

“Why are they there? And what is it doing to the environment?” he wants to know.

A Wartime Surplus

The Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet is a place for the Navy, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine to park ships that are taken out of service, but might one day be needed again — kind of like putting those sweaters into the cedar chest every spring. Hence the name “Mothball Fleet.”

Suisun Bay was first used for this purpose in 1946. World War II had just ended and the Navy had a huge surplus of vessels. Benicia was one of eight places around the country where rows of mothballed ships were anchored. At its peak, Suisun Bay had 340 ships lined up in neat rows. It was a forest of steel and wires.

Joe Pecoraro has been managing the Mothball Fleet for nearly 30 years.

“We had just about every kind of Navy ship here except for an aircraft carrier,” Pecoraro says. “We had guided-missile cruisers, frigates. We had a battleship for 10 years.”

The WWII battleship Iowa was a favorite of Pecoraro’s, before it was renovated into a floating museum and moved down to Los Angeles.

Not all ships have such a glamorous afterlife as the Iowa. Many of them once anchored there were beyond redemption, and were stripped of their parts. Few were ever put back into action.

“My dad used to call it Joe’s rusty navy,” says Pecoraro. “We had a lotta rust.”

Environmental Concerns Surface

Some ships in the fleet fell into such disrepair that environmentalists took notice.

“You could hear the crunch of the paint chips or the metal under your feet as you were walking across the decks of the ships,” says Sejal Choksi-Chugh, executive director of San Francisco Baykeeper. “That was just really horrifying because the minute it rained or the minute it got windy, all of that pollution just went right into the bay.”

And it wasn’t just rust. Harmful chemicals, lead, hazardous paint and asbestos were all coming off the vessels. Researchers found 20 tons of it had washed off the ships and into the water over the years. It’s an especially big problem because just next to the fleet sits Suisun Marsh — the largest salt marsh in the western United States, and an environmentally sensitive area.

In 2009, Baykeeper, along with other environmental groups and local water quality regulators, sued in federal court under various environmental laws. They won a settlement to get 57 creaky old ships out of Suisun and off to the scrapyard.

Moving each ship cost about $1 million and involved a 45-day trip behind a seagoing tug. In August, the last of the scrapped ships were hauled away to Brownsville, Texas, where they are broken down and recycled.

Even the top brass at the U.S. Maritime Administration, known as MARAD, which manages the fleet, agrees it was overdue.

“The first ships that left, the first two dozen — someone said we should’ve put them out of their misery years ago. We couldn’t have reactivated them ever if we needed to,” says MARAD executive director Joel Szabat. “We needed to find a way to get rid of them.”

The whole project cost about $57 million, but a MARAD official says they recouped about $30 million by selling the scrap metal.

Today’s Fleet

Though much smaller than it once was, the Ghost Fleet isn’t going away entirely. Today, only nine ships remain, plus the barge used as an office and maintenance base.

While it seems highly unlikely that we’ll ever see hundreds — or even the dozens of ships that reposed here less than 10 years ago — new ships can be added to the fleet. MARAD recently added a Navy tanker that’s part of the “Ready Reserve.” The Petersburg could be turned around in a few days if called back to duty, and a skeleton crew lives on board.

The remaining ships are outfitted with screens and filters to keep pollutants out of the bay, and MARAD now regularly tests the water quality.

So what did Steve Yeager, the listener who asked us about the fleet, think of our answer? He’s glad the environmental issues have been addressed, and doesn’t mind that a few ships are hanging around for the next generation to see out of the car window on trips up Interstate 680.

“My kids will ask me the same questions, but I’ll have a little more information now that I can tell them,” he says.

Watch this KQED video segment from 2008, when there were still more than 70 ships in Suisun Bay:

https://youtu.be/1BHfiaPb5UI

]]>Clusters of old military ships are anchored side by side in Suisun Bay. Most of them are decades old.Reported by Craig Miller. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Jessica Placzek, Suzie Racho and Penny Nelson. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean8:55What Gets Shipped Through the Port of Oakland?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/08/10/what-gets-shipped-through-the-port-of-oakland/
Thu, 10 Aug 2017 10:00:31 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11606579Bay Curious finds out what stuff and how much of it comes through the Port of Oakland.Oakland is home to the fifth-busiest container port in the country, and all around it containers are stacked sky-high like colorful, life-size Lego bricks.

Listener Ajith Kumar asked Bay Curious:

“Why are there millions of containers in West Oakland? How much trade is happening via those containers every month?”

I met port spokesman Mike Zampa at the edge of the seaport, where we could see ships coming in and thousands of 20-foot-long containers piled up.

The port handles about 2.5 million containers every year. Some of those are empty, either to be filled here or filled elsewhere. As for loaded containers, the port hit a record last year when it handled 1.9 million of them.

Almost everything can be, and is, sent by container ship, Zampa says. From palm trees to racehorses.

“You name it, you’ll find it in a container,” he says.

Ship Size Matters

As for the ships, they keep getting bigger to handle more volume. The biggest ships are longer than the Empire State Building is tall.

“If you tip the Empire State Building on its side, the biggest ships coming to Oakland are bigger,” Zampa says.

Your average ship can hold about 14,000 containers. Last year, the biggest ship that came to Oakland could hold more than 18,000 containers. According to the BBC, a ship that big could fit 36,000 cars or 863 million tins of baked beans.

This is one of the reasons shipping by sea is more efficient than shipping by air, Zampa says.

“If you put all that cargo on airplanes, how many airplanes would it take? I couldn’t tell you,” he says. “But that’s a lot more exhaust being emitted.”

Comparing the cargo space of an average freighter ship to the cargo space of a 747 airplane, it would take roughly 630 planes to move as much as a single ship. The difference is time. On average it takes a couple of weeks for a container ship to cross the Pacific from Asia.

A ‘Star Wars’ Connection?

We’ve been asked if the cranes at the port inspired George Lucas to create the AT-AT snow walkers in “The Empire Strikes Back.” It turns out that they did not.

Zampa says the port is still special, just not in a Hollywood way. One way it stands out is that this American port exports more than it imports. And that’s not the case with most other U.S. ports.

“Most other U.S. ports are heavily skewed toward imports,” Zampa says. “That reflects the trade imbalance that the U.S. has with the rest of the world.”

What’s in the Containers?

The Oakland port exports lots of dried fruits and nuts, wine and other beverages.

Zampa says demand from Asia is growing for American farm products.

“Their middle-class populations have exploded, and as the middle class develops, it develops middle-class tastes,” he says.

Another major export out of Oakland? Paper.

That’s because of all the cardboard boxes we use to package our goods.

“If you think about it, everything you buy is going to come in a cardboard box,” Zampa says. “The West Coast sends a lot of scrap paper to Asia to make cardboard boxes that then get filled with goods and shipped back here.”

The port’s busiest season comes in late summer and early fall as American retailers stock up for the holidays. Last year, the port’s busiest month was August, when more than 220,000 containers came or went.

Why Not San Francisco?

San Francisco was once the major port in Northern California, but when container shipping emerged, Zampa says San Francisco no longer had the land to handle containers. Oakland did. Today there are hundreds of acres of land devoted to container shipping.

The Oakland port has the advantage of being close to lots of cities and easily connecting to railway lines. About 10 percent to 20 percent of the containers head on to rail, destined for places like Salt Lake City or Denver.

But the majority of the container cargo is loaded onto trucks and taken to destinations in Northern California and western Nevada.

]]>Bay Curious finds out what stuff and how much of it comes through the Port of Oakland.Oakland is home to the fifth-busiest container port in the country and all around it, containers are stacked sky high like colorful, life-size Lego bricks. Listener Ajith Kumar asked Bay Curious: “Why are there millions of containers in West Oakland? How much trade is happening via those containers every month?” Bay Curious gets the answer. Credits: Jessica Placzek, Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy.KQEDclean5:19Mountain Lions: Real Threat to Bay Area Hikers?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/08/03/are-you-scared-of-mountain-lions-should-you-be/
Thu, 03 Aug 2017 10:00:11 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11608224A Bay Curious listener who hikes a lot wonders: Should he be scared of mountain lions? We find out for him.You know when you go out hiking and before you’ve even started, you see a sign like this?
If you encounter a mountain lion, face lion, back away slowly. Be large. Shout. Keep children close. Pick up children without bending. If attacked, fight back.

If you’re the nervous type, it can be unsettling.

Bay Curious listener Dave Fairburn wanted to know how much stock to put in these warnings — he’s a frequent hiker. He also wanted to know more about the Puma concolor, an animal that also goes by cougar, panther, ghost cat, mountain lion and more.

“I’ve never seen a mountain lion,” Fairburn says. “I don’t know anything about them, so I was kind of curious. Is it legitimate? Are they really here? Do I really need to think about them?”

Mountain lions are a top-of-the-food-chain type predator. Females can weigh between 80 to 85 pounds, and males get as big as 150 pounds.

Dave and I met at UC Santa Cruz to get answers from Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Chris Wilmers. He runs the Santa Cruz Puma Project, where researchers have been studying mountain lions for almost a decade. Together we walk off campus to an area with lots of redwoods trees, where mountain lions roam.

One of Fairburn’s first questions: How many mountain lions are there in the Bay Area?

“The short answer is, I don’t really know,” Wilmers says. His best guess is there are probably 50 or 60 mountain lions in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which stretches from south of San Francisco to Watsonville.

“And that’s probably the largest chunk of contiguous habitat for mountain lions in the Bay Area, so that would be the largest sub-population,” Wilmers says.

California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that there could be 4,000 to 6,000 mountain lions in California.

How worried should we be?

Our question-asker Fairburn worries when he’s out hiking and wants to know: Is he safe?

Wilmers says it’s important to keep things in perspective. Mountain lions actually go out of their way to avoid us. One way mountain lions avoid us is by shifting to a more nocturnal schedule than typical when they’re in areas where humans go.

And as far as tracking us as prey? No, not a thing.

“What they really love to eat is deer,” Wilmers says. “About 95 percent of the calories they ingest come from deer. Their behavior is to try to avoid you, rather than seek you out as prey.”

Wilmers likes to tell people it’s far more risky to drive a car or even brush your teeth. One of his favorite comparisons is how many people impale themselves on their toothbrush and die.

“You know, it’s something like 10 or 11 a year,” Wilmers says. “So probababilistically, you’ve got a greater chance of impaling yourself on your toothbrush than being killed by a mountain lion, but we don’t think of the toothbrush as being dangerous.”

If they’re avoiding us, this made Fairburn wonder about the one or two animals a year that find their way into towns, often on the peninsula. Wilmer says they’re basically lost.

“Those are almost always young animals, usually young males that are out looking for a new territory,” Wilmers says. “They essentially make a mistake and wander into a downtown.”

So, while humans are relatively safe, it’s probably less safe for Fido and Fluffy. And for livestock in more remote areas.

Are They at Risk?

We’ve mostly been talking about whether we’re in danger of mountain lions. But it’s also worth asking: Are they in danger of us?

Mountain lions depend on having space to roam. The more space humans take up, and the more open space we cut into smaller pieces with roads and freeways, the more we put them at risk.

There are efforts to build tunnels under Highways 101 and 280 to give the mountain lions a way to get around. That’s because so many are being hit and killed by cars. Last year, UC Davis counted 48 mountain lions deaths on California roads. But the co-director of UC Davis’s Road Ecology Center, Fraser Shilling, says the actual number of roadkill deaths could be double that.

If the population of mountain lions in the Santa Cruz Mountains ends up isolated — and can’t diversify its gene pool — Wilmers says they’d probably go extinct within 100 years.

How Do They Mate?

If there are so few and if they’re pretty spread out, how do they find each other in the first place? You know … to mate?

The males pick a spot on what’s basically a “mountain lion highway” in the woods. They scratch the ground, pee and leave.

When a female comes looking for a mate, if she likes what she smells, she caterwauls. It sounds kind of like your neighborhood cat in heat, but a lot louder and deeper. Wilmers says researchers think mountain lions set up these communication hot spots in places where they can hear the female from long distances.

Once she caterwauls, she waits. And if a male finds her, the happy couple spend two or three days together. Three months later, baby mountain lions!

]]>A Bay Curious listener who hikes a lot wonders: Should he be scared of mountain lions? We find out for him.A Bay Curious listener who hikes a lot wonders: Should he be scared of mountain lions? We find out for him.<br />
<br />
Reported by Vinnee Tong. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Penny Nelson, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean8:46The Mesmerizing Machine That Makes Your Golden Gate Bridge Drive Less Terrifyinghttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/27/the-mesmerizing-machine-that-makes-driving-across-the-golden-gate-bridge-less-terrifying/
Thu, 27 Jul 2017 12:00:45 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11594879Two years ago, a big steel-and-concrete median barrier went in on the Golden Gate Bridge. Bay Curious answers all your questions about it.Stephanie Schmidt lives in San Francisco and works north of the city, in Marin County. For years, she’s had to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge twice a day, every day.

“I’ve been crossing that thing probably near on 10,000 times, easily,” she said.

Crossing the bridge used to be a semi-terrifying experience — not just for her, but for most drivers. The lanes on the historic Golden Gate Bridge are narrow, and for decades there was very little separating the traffic heading in opposite directions — just flimsy yellow plastic tubes placed every few feet. If you happened to be driving in the center lane, it could feel like you were going to collide head-on with oncoming traffic.

“There’s a reason why it was nicknamed a suicide lane, because you were very exposed,” said Schmidt.

It wasn’t just terrifying for drivers, but for bridge workers, too. Several times each day, to help with traffic flow, they would move the plastic tubes to change the number of lanes in each direction. It was a fairly low-tech process.

“They had a guy hanging out of the back of a pickup truck moving the pegs,” said Schmidt, “which just didn’t look safe.”

All that is why, just over two years ago, in January 2015, something on Schmidt’s drive changed.

Now, instead of flimsy tubes, there’s a big steel-and-concrete barrier. But moving a big heavy barrier like that can’t be done by a few workers in a pickup truck anymore. Now they have a special, custom-made vehicle, dubbed “the zipper machine.” (It’s actually called a “barrier transfer machine,” but even the bridge officials refer to it as the zipper machine, so we’ll go with it.)

That zipper machine raised a number of questions for our commuter.

Is it faster for the technicians now to move the lanes? What’s the etiquette of driving around those machines? Why do they have two machines? And why or what dictates when the barrier gets moved on the Golden Gate Bridge?

To answer all those questions, we went to the bridge to talk to Bill San Gregory, who supervises road services. He met us during a morning lane change, as the machine traveled across the bridge, changing the number of lanes back to the default set-up: three headed in each direction.

“Well, the machine drives along. It’s already on the wall, so it just picks the wall up about 4 inches and moves it over one lane exactly,” he said.

The machine isn’t automated. A worker has to drive it, following blue guidelines that have been painted on the road in order to stay in a straight line. (Bonus answer: That’s why there are blue lines painted on the road.)

At the front-left corner of the machine, the heavy barrier gets picked up, then it snakes through the machine, and comes out the back — moved to the right by one lane.

It can sound complicated, but it’s easier to understand if you see it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeX1Fl_1cVE

And just like that, the number of lanes in each direction has changed — and no one had to hang out the back of a truck. Plus, it’s virtually impossible to have a head-on collision now; you’ll just hit the barrier instead.

“It was simply a safety factor. That’s why we have that barrier,” said Lisa Locati, the bridge patrol caption.

From 1971 to 2007, 16 people died from head-on collisions on the bridge. And how many have died since the new barrier went in? None, said Locati.

But it’s not like this was suddenly a new problem two years ago, when the barrier finally went in. Bridge officials have actually been trying to get a moveable barrier in place since 1982.

“There was nothing that would work for our roadway because the lanes are so narrow,” Locati said.

The center lanes on the Golden Gate Bridge are just 10 feet wide — whereas regular traffic lanes are usually 12 or 13 feet wide — and a regular moveable barrier is 2 feet across. That didn’t leave a lot of room for cars, so something special had to be constructed.

“They designed this wall specifically for our bridge,” said Locati. “It’s only one foot at its widest point.”

That’s how it works, but, per Schmidt’s first question: Is it faster than the old system?

“By the time the guys get on the machine and start it up and do all their system checks, to moving the barrier, to then powering down the machine, it takes about an hour,” said Locati. The zipper machine tops out at 7 to 8 mph.

The old system took about an hour, too, so it’s actually not any faster.

And what if you drive past it while the change is happening? San Gregory said: Don’t overthink it.

“Just act normal, drive right by the machine. You don’t have to move or adjust your speed or anything like that,” he said.

If you need to move over because the number of lanes in your direction is changing, then you’ll see a big flashing traffic arrow anyway. The machine can move the barrier only to the right, which means that when it travels south into the city it’s always decreasing the number of lanes traveling into San Francisco — but because it’s fewer lanes from the start of your drive across the bridge, you’ll always feel like you get an additional lane after you pass the zipper machine. So, you will never be driving in a lane and suddenly have it end — that would be unsafe.

You can watch this video from the company that designed the barrier:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiZTVORhtQ

That’s also why there are two machines. When it’s three lanes in each direction, there’s a machine at each end, so the traffic flow could be shifted either way. But once one of the machines travels one way, then there are two machines at that end and four lanes of traffic traveling toward the machines. It could then be easily switched back to three and three.

And that brings us to Schmidt’s final question: “What makes them change the lanes, because it seems really inconsistent?”

When the barrier first went in, they’d move it whenever the flow of traffic hit a trigger point — “3,500 vehicles per lane of traffic per hour,” said Locati. But drivers didn’t like the inconsistency of not knowing exactly when the barrier would move.

“We realized the public wanted a more concrete schedule, so that it could be predictable,” she said. For about a year now, they’ve been pretty set in their schedule.

Basically, they move the barrier at commute time to accommodate traffic flow. To be more specific: Every weekday around 4:30 a.m., they change to four lanes traveling into the city until 9 a.m., when they move back to three in each direction. Then on Tuesdays through Fridays, they switch to four lanes traveling in the outbound direction from 3:30 to 5 p.m. (On Mondays, traffic is lighter, so the number of lanes stays equal in each direction.)

This also sounds more complicated than it is. But overall most drivers think the zipper machine is much better than the old system — including Schmidt.

“I like the zipper machine, because those pegs, sometimes they would miss a hole and they would just throw it, and it would be laying in the lane. And I would be terrified of running over it and popping my tire,” she said.

Fear no more, Schmidt.

]]>Two years ago, a big steel-and-concrete median barrier went in on the Golden Gate Bridge. Bay Curious answers all your questions about it.Two years ago, a big steel and concrete median barrier went in on the Golden Gate Bridge, and two yellow machines appeared that move it several times a day. Bridge commuters have some questions.<br />
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Reported by Kelly O'Mara. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Julia McEvoy, Penny Nelson and Suzie Racho. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean6:41The Island Ghost Town in the Middle of San Francisco Bayhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/20/the-island-ghost-town-in-the-middle-of-san-francisco-bay/
Thu, 20 Jul 2017 10:00:45 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11549263It's illegal to step foot in this Bay Area ghost town ... so we visited for you.n an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay sits a series of abandoned wooden buildings, slumped over and sinking into the ground. They’re all that remain of the town called Drawbridge — often referred to as the last ghost town left in the Bay Area.

Bay Curious listener John Aird is a fifth-generation Californian who lives in Santa Cruz. Decades ago he visited the town when a few people were still living there. Now he’s back and curious about its history.

“I’d like to know more about Drawbridge. Anything about the history and when and why it was created and when it became a ghost town,” he says.

The Beginning

In the late 1800s, San Francisco was growing and its inhabitants found themselves with free time and a desire to go on vacation. Even back then, the beautiful beaches of Santa Cruz were an attractive destination for fogged-in city dwellers — though it took a lot of effort to get there.

“If they went by stagecoach, it would take them a couple days down through the peninsula,” says Ceal Craig, president of the San Francisco Bay Wildlife Society and co-author of an upcoming book about Drawbridge titled, “Sinking Underwater: A Ghost Town’s Amazing Legacy.”

The long journey could cost more than $40 at the time, which today would be more than $900. All that to go about 75 miles to Santa Cruz!

Two men saw all this money changing hands and thought they could build a good business catering to the vacationers.

“Slippery” Jim Fair was a politician and Alfred “Hog” Davis owned a meatpacking plant. Together they formed a railroad company called the South Pacific Coast Railroad. In several hours it could ferry San Franciscans to Alameda and then put them on a train down to Santa Cruz.

“They had this challenge because if they went all the way on land, that makes a very long railroad,” Craig said.

To make the trip shorter, they laid tracks across some marshlands at the south end of the bay. At one section, the tracks cross a small island that’s less than a mile long. The island is flanked by two major waterways, Coyote Creek and Warm Springs Slough, that got a lot of boat traffic.

To get past the water, the railroad company built swing bridges that were completed in 1876. A swing bridge is designed to turn at the center of the waterway.

“Drawbridge is a misnomer,” Craig says. “The town should be called Swing Bridge.”

The bridges needed to be opened manually, and the first bridge tender was George Mundershietz. When he moved to the island, his cabin was the only building there.

Though there were no other people, Mundershietz was surrounded by plenty of wildlife. Fish and shrimp thrived in the muddy waters, and thousands of birds hid in the pristine marshlands and high grasses. Passengers on trains passing through noticed. Before long, hunters began abandoning their trips to Santa Cruz to get off the train early and shoot ducks. When they got too tired to make it home, they’d pay Mundershietz 50 cents to spend the night in his cabin.

A Bustling Town

From there, Drawbridge grew. Outdoorsmen started coming to Drawbridge in droves. Trains started making regular stops in town, and hunting cabins popped up all over the island.

Around 1900, the Sprung Hotel opened and became a fixture. The hotel served duck dinners and provided the town with water, which was pumped from the ground daily. Joe Sprung and his wife, Hedwig, ran the hotel. When all the rooms were full, Mrs. Sprung would rent out her room and sleep in the bathtub.

“There were no police, no mayor, no city council — nothing like that,” Craig says.

With little government oversight, the town developed a reputation as a place to go for prostitution and gambling. But former residents didn’t talk about that in interviews. Instead they waxed on about idyllic rural living and hunting.

Before limits were imposed, hunters would fill small cannons with shot, nails and chains to kill hundreds of birds in a single go.

The town reached its heyday in the 1920s. There were about 80 or 90 houses, many on stilts and with their own rowboats. Five trains a day stopped at Drawbridge, bringing visitors to shoot, fish, relax and drink. Despite Prohibition, Mrs. Sprung brewed her own dark beer and sold it to hotel visitors for 25 cents. On the weekends the small island’s population would swell to 600.

Even in a town this small, former residents remember a strong class divide. The south end of town was where most full-time residents lived. They included hunters, fishermen, and employees of the hotel and railroad. To get to school, the children of workers would walk along the 3 miles of track to the nearby town of Alviso. Meanwhile, the north end was mostly for part-timers in town on vacation.

Becoming a Ghost Town

Not long after Drawbridge’s rise came its fall.

The South Bay was industrializing and its population was growing. Nearby cities like San Jose and Fremont started pouring industrial waste and untreated human sewage into the bay, which harmed the creeks around Drawbridge. It was unpleasant for both humans and wildlife.

Salt manufacturing in the South Bay also expanded. By the 1930s, half of the marshland had been converted into salt ponds, destroying the habitat of many birds.

With polluted water and fewer birds to hunt, Drawbridge lost its luster and visitors came less frequently.

By the 1950s, more South Bay residents meant more demand for water, and they began tapping the aquifer. The deep wells in Drawbridge ran dry and the town began to sink into the bay.

When the tides rose, sometimes they’d rise a little too high. The documentary film “Drawbridge” tells of a woman cooking in galoshes, as she watched a fish swim in and out of her kitchen.

By 1963, fewer than five residents were left.

Life got harder for those who stayed, as local newspapers began writing about Drawbridge as if it were already a ghost town. This attracted some unsavory characters.

“People would come out and do inappropriate things,” Craig says. “Theft, vandalism, going through people’s houses, things like that, burning them down. So it just became a little dangerous.”

The remaining residents felt unsafe, and all but one left.

Charles Luce was the last resident of Drawbridge, and lived alone out there for years.

“One character, he came in there. He broke the door, I was inside,” Luce said in an interview for the “Drawbridge” documentary. “And that’s when I put the shotgun right between his shoulder blades. … Don’t move. … Made him lay down on the floor, what went through my mind at that particular time is, ‘What if he won’t lie down? Will I shoot him?’ That’d be murder!”

Luce finally left in 1979. By then, the town had been designated as a wildlife refuge. Drawbridge was just for the birds. No hunting allowed.

Nowadays the only way to get to the town is on a train that doesn’t stop. Riding through, you can see the two dozen remaining structures. They’re in bad shape. A few are covered in graffiti, and others are nothing but the bones of the buildings they once were. They’ve been left to the elements and, year by year, they sink deeper into the mud.

]]>It's illegal to step foot in this Bay Area ghost town ... so we visited for you.Drawbridge was a popular bird hunting destination decades. What happened?<br />
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Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Suzie Racho. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. <br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean10:19What Is the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Why Is It in San Jose?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/07/13/what-is-the-rosicrucian-egyptian-museum-and-why-is-it-in-san-jose/
Thu, 13 Jul 2017 07:01:17 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11551947?updated=true'We host 110,000 guests per year, and about 26,000 of them are sixth-graders,' says the museum's executive director.If you attended sixth grade anywhere in or near San Jose, there’s a high likelihood you’ve been to see the largest collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities on public display anywhere west of the Mississippi.

Peggy Tran-Le visited as a teenager, but she still has questions. Sooooo many questions.

“Why San Jose? How did they get those mummies? How did those mummies get out of Egypt? And why is it not — I mean, maybe I’m mistaken, but — why is it not better known?”

To find the answers, I joined her for a visit to the museum.

The entrance is lined with huge columns, potted papyrus and rows of ram-headed sphinxes — just like the ones lining the processional road to Karnak. Then, you open the giant brass-plated doors, and you see sixth-graders. Lots and lots of sixth-graders.

“We host 110,000 guests per year, and about 26,000 of them are sixth-graders,” says Julie Scott, executive director of the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.

As it happens, Scott is also a practicing Rosicrucian, which is to say she belongs to a philosophical society that believes there’s a spiritual, transformative value to nerding out on ancient Egypt.

“I’ve been to Egypt 12 times now,” she says. “There’s always something fascinating to learn and discover.”

Rosicrucianism in its modern form bloomed around the turn of the 20th century, along with a host of other metaphysical philosophies seeking to plumb ancient depths for fresh perspectives on the mysteries of life and nature.

Local Rosicrucians began collecting ancient artifacts in 1929 and just kept going. There’s room after room of more than 4,000 statues and maps and mummies: human and otherwise.

“I think as a teenager, the animal mummies were the highlight of my first visit,” Tran-Le says.

Over the years, the museum has modernized to take advantage of advancements in science. Egyptologists have visited and reassessed various items. As an example, Scott tells me the back story behind a baboon mummy that captures my attention.

“So, this baboon, he looks — he is ancient, but he’s not a baboon,” Scott says. “We found, after doing an X-ray of him, that the body is actually a ceramic jar. The Egyptians would do this. They would put just a small piece of an animal, say, part of a bone or some of their fur, in this votive offering, and that way they could make more votive offerings.”

To enhance the educational purpose of the collection, the Roscicrucians have also had a few replicas cast of famous items like King Tut’s golden sarcophagus and the Rosetta Stone. There’s also a tomb that is a composite replica of several real tombs in Egypt.

“In 1966, a team of Rosicrucian researchers went to Egypt and explored a number of tombs in the Beni Hasan region,” Scott explains, adding this tomb was most like the one of a man who was named Khnumhotep. He was not a pharaoh, but a nomarch — a governor, like Gov. Jerry Brown.

The tomb is located at the end of a series of winding stairs, not unlike the line you travel through to get to the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. Ask people what they remember from their childhood visit here, and it comes down to the animal mummies and the tomb.

There are lots of thoughtful, even funny, touches. For example, the sarcophagus in this tomb is missing because it was “robbed,” as so many ancient Egyptian tombs were. Also, the lighting is low enough to encourage young minds to think anxious thoughts.

“I have to say that this part of the museum always scared me as a kid,” Tran-Le says, laughing. “It’s such a, it’s a dopey reaction, but it scared me. So I’m having just sort of flashbacks to being a scared young person down here.”

We retreat to another gallery focused on the daily lives of ancient Egyptians. As you wander through the rooms, you’re reminded of just how impressive, how sophisticated they really were. They brewed beer, as we do today. They worshipped cats, as we do today. They kept their kohl, their black eye makeup, in cylinders that look just like mascara containers today.

The museum is the crown jewel in a complex that includes a planetarium and a research library with ancient books from big names like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, who the Rosicrucians of today claim as their own.

“Isaac Newton had the largest collection of alchemical books in Europe,” Scott says. “But he had to keep that private, because mystics at that time, they basically had to say, ‘OK, I’m just focusing on science. I’m staying out of religion. You guys do your religious stuff.’ But he was a very avid alchemist.”

So, modern scientists have been able to turn baser metals into gold, but it’s a hugely complicated and expensive effort that involves a particle accelerator. The kind of alchemy the Rosicrucians believe is possible has not been replicated by modern scientists. The local order of Rosicrucians has posted a number of videos allowing you to explore the ideas for yourself.

https://youtu.be/qOCdFDXe5jQ

“We don’t see (the pyramid) as a tomb,” Scott says. “We see it as an initiation chamber.”

This line of conversation raises another question for Tran-Le: “When I came here with my friend’s mom and my friend, we walked the grounds and she said, ‘Oh, this is where the order held secret ceremonies.’ I don’t know if she was just trying to entertain a bunch of teenagers. Or is that something you can confirm? Or deny?”

Scott explains: “Well, we hold regular meetings for Rosicrucians that include a meditation and a discussion. They’re private to only Rosicrucians. We wouldn’t call them secret, but you have to be a Rosicrucian member to participate. That’s held in our grand temple, which is for Rosicrucians — that’s the spiritual headquarters, here at Rosicrucian Park.”

Scott says there about 250,000 Rosicrucians worldwide, and other big centers like this one in France and Brazil. The New Yorker who started the U.S. chapter landed in San Jose’s bucolic Rose Garden neighborhood because land was cheap here. Well, it was back in the early 20th century!

Scott adds: “People in this part of the world are so open to other ways of thinking and learning — and especially to more than just intellectual learning and understanding.”

From the beginning, the Golden State has welcomed seekers, people keen to remake the world into something less rational and boring, into something more mystical and spiritually resonant. But if you’re thinking Rosicrucianism is a religion, it’s not.

“I know Rosicrucians who are Catholics and Buddhist and Jews — every religion that I’m aware of, I’ve met somebody who is a practitioner of that religion,” Scott says. “There are also Rosicrucians who don’t consider themselves religious at all. They consider themselves spiritual.”

Regardless, you don’t have to believe to benefit from the Rosicrucians’ enthusiasm for ancient Egypt.

Anne Austin is an Egyptologist and archaeologist at Stanford who teaches a class called Egyptomania. She takes every class to San Jose. “I think it’s a great teaching collection, especially for people who are new to Egypt,” Austin says.

“I think they’re open to a variety of interpretations of Egypt in a way that Egyptologists are less open,” Austin says. “So we’re not really open to thinking about past lives in Egypt. We’re not really open to feeling a kind of spiritual, direct connection with Egypt. I do not feel a direct spiritual connection with Egypt.”

And the Rosicrucians, it’s fair to say, do.

]]>'We host 110,000 guests per year, and about 26,000 of them are sixth-graders,' says the museum's executive director.If you attended sixth grade anywhere in or near San Jose, there’s a high likelihood you've been to see the largest collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities on public display anywhere west of the Mississippi. I'm talking about the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.<br />
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Credits: Rachael Myrow, Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Jessica Placzek, Julia McEvoy.<br />KQEDclean10:32Why the ‘O’ in San Francisco’s Airport Code, SFO?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/29/where-do-airport-codes-come-from/
Thu, 29 Jun 2017 07:01:05 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11526958?updated=trueWhy the "O" in SFO? And why is one of Chicago's airports coded ORD? And IAD for Dulles?ADDFATFIG.

That short “poem” is not just a string of random words. They’re all airport codes. But how do airports get these codes? To some, certain codes don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason. Which brings us to a question from listener Ruth Suter, who flies in and out of the Bay Area a lot.

“Why is the San Francisco airport called SFO?”

The SF seems obvious, but where did the O come from? Does it have to do with Oakland? We talked to John Hill at the SFO Museum.

“It’s an interesting story, and it came from the three-letter code distinctions that were established by the International Air Transport Association. Also called IATA. That group was formed in 1945,” Hill says.

Before IATA, most airports were identified by the two letters used by the National Weather Service codes. It usually made sense. Los Angeles was LA, Phoenix was PH, San Francisco was SF.

“But as aviation quickly advanced, and more airports were established, two-letter codes sort of ran out of steam,” Hill says.

To have more options, IATA required airports to have three letters instead of two, increasing the possible combinations from 650 to 15,600.

“The only real requirement was that no two codes were the same. So as long as everybody had a distinct three-letter code, the system would work,” Hill says.

There was no universal naming convention, though there are some patterns.

A few airports just added an X to the end of their two-letter codes. Like Portland (PDX) and Los Angeles (LAX).

Other airports decided to use the first three letters of the city’s name, like OAK in Oakland.

Then there were airports that took the acronyms of their namesakes, like JFK for New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Other codes are inspired by places that are no longer there, or names that are no longer used. Chicago’s O’Hare airport (ORD) was once known as Orchard Field Airport, named after a small town that was once nearby, Orchard Place. In New Orleans, MSY got its name from the Moisant Stock Yards.

Then there are the codes that seemingly make no sense at all, like EWR for Newark Liberty International Airport. It’s like that because in the United States, codes starting with N can only be used by the Navy.

But what about Ruth’s airport? SFO? Turns out it has nothing to do with Oakland.

“You know, Oakland’s Airport started virtually the same time that San Francisco’s did. So it would have been confusing to put those together, and I think Oakland tried to get its own three-letter code from the same time frame as SFO,” Hill says.

“With S.F. they simply took an O, which we can assume was convenient to the fact that San Francisco has an O at the end of it,” says Hill.

]]>Why the "O" in SFO? And why is one of Chicago's airports coded ORD? And IAD for Dulles?Why the "O" in SFO? And why is one of Chicago's airports coded ORD? And IAD for Dulles?<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean4:10Homelessness: You’ve Got Questions, We’ve Got Answershttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/22/homelessness-youve-got-questions-weve-got-answers/
Fri, 23 Jun 2017 00:00:51 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11001829?updated=trueWhat causes homelessness? Are people getting bused to San Francisco? Can we build tiny homes here? Answers to these questions and more.For KQED’s week of homelessness coverage, we asked you to submit your questions on homelessness. We received over 1,300 submissions. This week, Bay Curious answers some of the most frequently asked.

What are the most common causes of homelessness?

Homelessness mostly arises from poverty and a lack of affordable housing. In the Bay Area, the cost of housing is outpacing what people making minimum wage can afford. When they lose their jobs, or their housing, they are at risk for becoming homeless.

In San Francisco during the 2017 Homeless Count, 22 percent of the respondents reported job loss as the primary cause for their homelessness. Eviction accounted for 12 percent of responses.

Other people were forced out of their homes due to interpersonal tensions: arguments with family (13 percent), and breakups and divorce (10 percent). These things alone do not cause homelessness. It’s a systemic issue involving poverty, inadequate safety nets, lack of opportunity and an increasingly expensive housing market.

The second most self-reported cause of homelessness was alcohol or substance abuse (15 percent).

Outside of San Francisco, causes homeless people cite shift slightly. Read the full report for your county for more details.

It’s important to note that two-thirds of the respondents cited one or more health conditions. These include physical illness, physical disabilities, chronic substance abuse and severe mental health conditions.

“The most common mental health problem among people who are homeless is severe depression, followed by bipolar disease, followed by schizophrenia. People have this view that everyone has a thought disorder and that’s just not true,” says Kushel.

Kushel also wants to point out that some of the people you see on the street acting erratically are actually housed and in treatment programs.

“People who are housed may still be out on the street engaging in behaviors that might look like they are homeless,” says Kushel. “In fact, many of the people who don’t have housing in this city are invisible to the general public. You’d never guess that they don’t have a home,”

What do I do if I think someone needs help?

Like most cities, San Francisco has a a 311 number to call if outreach or other resources are needed.

In fact, there are multiple outreach groups that aid homeless people, such as the San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team (415-734-4233) or the San Francisco Mobile Crisis Treatment Team (415-970-4000)

Are other cities sending their homeless to San Francisco with one-way bus tickets?

Yes, people are being sent here, but it doesn’t work the way you think it might. Most cities have programs that put homeless people on buses. These buses bring homeless people to friends and family where they can find support and a stable living situation. Some people arrive here using such programs.

San Francisco also has one of these programs, it’s called Homeward Bound. It provides a ticket, travel aid and an escort to the bus for people who have confirmed housing and support in another city. Since 2005, over 10,000 people have gotten bus tickets through the Homeward Bound program.

Yet, while reuniting people with friends and families can be a good thing, homeless advocates worry that the bus ticket programs are abused and don’t help people but simply export people and their problems elsewhere. Some participants in the program are not even going home but simply to other areas that might have an open bed. Critics claim that these programs don’t do enough to ensure that people’s needs will be met at their destination.

But cities have an economic incentive to keep the program running. San Francisco’s Homeward Bound program spends an average of $185 per ticket, whereas housing and caring for people without shelter can cost thousands of dollars.

That said, there have been examples of bus tickets being used illegally. A few years ago, a Las Vegas hospital was found to be systematically putting mentally ill patients on Greyhound buses out of town. It was estimated that about 500 patients had destinations in California. Last year, San Francisco won a $400,000 settlement from the state of Nevada to cover the medical costs of some 24 patients who arrived in the city with one-way tickets.

Do any of the homeless choose life on the street?

“When people who are homeless are offered a safe and decent place to call home, we find they always say yes,” says Jennifer Friedenbach, the director of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness.

“People often mistake turning down one night in a shelter as choosing to be homeless. They don’t understand that you have to lose all your belongings, separate from your pet, separate from your partner and wait in line for hours on end, only to get five hours of sleep and get kicked out in the next day without your property and survival gear,” says Friedenbach.

Other reasons people cite for opting out of shelters include violence, racism, homophobia and transphobia. There are others who decide to sleep on the streets because they want to avoid the bureaucracy and restrictions that come with living in supportive housing. “After going through the merry-go-round of social services … people might not be interested in a sheltered treatment-type program for long periods of time. They want to be more independent and off on their own,” says Eduardo Vega, a past director of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco .

In regard to long-term housing, the director of Hospitality House, told the San Francisco Chronicle that there’s more to a person’s refusal of housing. “A lot of times people have been traumatized and re-traumatized and they don’t think [their lives will change]. They might need a little bit more work in order to be able to make that leap.”

What happens to all the money that San Francisco spends on the homeless?

San Francisco allocated over $241 million on homelessness for the 2015-2016 fiscal year.

The proposed budget for the 2017-2018 fiscal year includes $245.5 million to address homelessness and supportive housing. The plan allocates over $11 million for outreach and prevention and over $203 million towards shelter and housing.

Why are there so many homeless people in San Francisco, and why are they so visible?

“It’s because of the high housing costs. San Francisco has a huge homeless population because it’s one of the most expensive cities,” says Kushel, the UCSF professor who specializes in homeless issues. “There is a myth that homeless people are drawn to San Francisco because it’s such a great place to be homeless. But research doesn’t hold that up.”

“The draw of a milder climate only has a marginal effect,” says Eduardo Vega, the previous director of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco.

According to the 2015 San Francisco Homeless Count, of the 7,539 people counted, 71 percent lived in the city before they lost housing. Only 10 percent came from outside the state and the remaining 19 percent came from elsewhere in California.

“We do know that across the country, when people become homeless, they tend to migrate to a city. That’s because it’s hard to experience homelessness in a suburban area. You might have to walk 4, 10, or 20 miles to the nearest service agency. So, people tend to move to cities, but there’s nothing about San Francisco in particular,” says Kushel.

According to Vega, the ratio of housed to unhoused people in San Francisco is unremarkable for a city of its size.

“Because we have a small dense metropolitan area and a lot of people are crowded into the same 4 square miles downtown, there is a perception that the problem is somehow much worse in San Francisco,” says Vega.

In the 2015 report by U.S. Housing and Urban Development, San Francisco’s homeless population, in sheer numbers, is smaller than New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, Las Vegas, D.C. and Chicago.

“The problem is that homelessness is a big problem across the country. But here people are seeing lots of homelessness and getting sensitized to it, which is good,” says Vega.

Why are there so many young homeless people in San Francisco than other places?

“More and more, we are seeing Bay Area youth becoming homeless,” says Mary Howe, director of the Homeless Youth Alliance. The organization provides a safe space for homeless youth in the Haight neighborhood and focuses on providing harm reduction services. The Haight is one neighborhood where young people living on the street are highly visible.

Many young people become homeless after aging out of the foster care system. Some were homeless with their families but left because they don’t want to be a burden. Some leave abusive, traumatic or neglectful homes. Others are kicked out after coming out as LGBTQ. In San Francisco, 48 percent of the young respondents in the 2015 homeless count identified as LGBTQ.

Similar to the adults, many of the homeless youth lived here before becoming homeless. According to the Homeless Youth Count, 56 percent of the homeless youth population was living in San Francisco prior to becoming homeless. Another 25 percent came from another county in California and 19 percent came from out of state. Many of the newcomers head to the Haight.

“I do think the Haight in particular is an international destination for young people. It will always draw people in, as it did in the ’60s. People still view it as something better than what they are leaving,” says Howe. “I also want to point out that many of the people paying rent in San Francisco are actually not from here either.”

Are there any plans for adopting a “Housing First” program similar to that in Salt Lake City?

According to Kevin Fagen, Salt Lake City has “all but ended chronic homelessness.” The city accomplished this through an aggressive “Housing First” program, which quickly puts people into permanent housing. There are no requirements for eligibility, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation. Over 2,000 people who were formerly chronically homeless are housed in what is described as “showpieces of modern architecture.”

So why can’t San Francisco do this? Well, the city actually does have a Housing First program. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, it includes about 5,000 units of supportive housing in the Tenderloin neighborhood. But why hasn’t the program seen the same success as Salt Lake City?

According to Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan, Salt Lake City has more data on its homeless population, enabling the program to target the most at-risk people on the street. These are the people who use emergency services most. By identifying these folks, government and nonprofit agencies can quickly house and begin supportive services catered to the individual’s needs.

San Francisco has no single information network that tracks homeless people and the services they use. This hinders the city’s ability to help people who need it most.

Fagan says that another reason San Francisco’s program isn’t as successful is because it’s harder to cultivate a culture of self-improvement in the Tenderloin. Residents with substance abuse issues have a difficult time breaking old habits. Counselors in the Tenderloin are spread too thin and can have up to 100 clients each. By comparison, the Salt Lake City program has one counselor for every 15 residents.

“We provide a fair number of [Housing First units], but we need a lot more,” says Vega, the director of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco.

Today, San Francisco still has 1,745 chronically homeless individuals and 18 chronically homeless families. To provide more supportive housing similar to the Salt Lake City model, the main obstacle will be the cost. Building housing in the country’s most expensive real estate market costs heaps more than in Utah.

Furthermore, the high prices both cause homelessness and create barriers to finding a home outside of government support. In Salt Lake City, the program has a 15 percent turnover each year as people are able to transition out and support themselves. In San Francisco, less than 5 percent of the residents leave the program each year. They stay longer because they cannot afford to leave.

This story was originally published on June 21st 2016. It was updated on June 23rd 2017.

]]>What causes homelessness? Are people getting bused to San Francisco? Can we build tiny homes here? Answers to these questions and more.What causes homelessness? What's the best way to help people you see on the street? And what other cities have had success in solving homelessness?<br />
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Reported by Jessica Placzek, Olivia Allen-Price and Vinnee Tong. Production help from Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean16:34What Would Really Happen if a Tsunami Hit the Bay Area?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/15/what-would-really-happen-if-a-tsunami-hit-san-francisco/
Thu, 15 Jun 2017 07:01:22 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10628782?updated=trueYou may have seen a tsunami hit San Francisco in a movie, but what would it really be like?In 2015, Steven Horowitz was watching one of the summer’s big blockbuster action flicks, “San Andreas.” In the movie, the San Andreas fault shifts, triggering a magnitude 9.6 earthquake in San Francisco. Disaster ensues — and for the rest of the movie we watch as all of the West Coast’s greatest landmarks are destroyed one by one in an epic, computer-generated spectacle.

“I was sitting there watching the giant tsunami course through the Golden Gate and into the bay,” he says. “I looked at that and thought: Wouldn’t there be some kind of dissipation coming through the Golden Gate?”

He asked Bay Curious:

If a tsunami were to hit the Golden Gate, what would be its real effect on communities facing the San Francisco Bay?

It’s All About Our Faults

Despite the terrifying image of a 250-foot wave about to wash over the Golden Gate Bridge, tsunamis do not actually pose a considerable threat to the Bay Area.

It all has to do with the kinds of geologic faults that we have (and don’t have).

Tsunamis are caused when one tectonic plate slides underneath another — a process called subduction. This slow movement is happening all the time, but sometimes a plate will get stuck and pressure starts to build. When it finally lets go, there’s an underwater earthquake that can move the seafloor up and down, sending a wave to the surface of the ocean.

But the San Andreas Fault is different. It’s called a slip-strike fault because the two plates slide past each other horizontally. Of course, whenever plates move, the ground shakes. But here, there is no subduction and little displaced ocean.

Meaning no killer tsunamis. Even San Francisco’s infamous 1906 earthquake generated only a 4-inch wave at the Presidio gauge station.

Small Waves Still Pack a Punch

Although they aren’t generated here, tsunamis do occasionally hit our shores. Since 1854, more than 71 tsunamis have been recorded in San Francisco Bay. Most were generated by earthquakes in subduction zones near Russia, Japan or Alaska.

Eric Geist, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, says that size is the most important factor in evaluating risk.

“We can look at anything, from huge waves to micro-tsunamis, that you’d never see with your eyes but our instruments can detect,” he says.

The worst tsunami to hit the Bay Area was triggered in 1964 by a magnitude 9.2 earthquake in Alaska, Geist says, that killed 11 people in Crescent City. That wave rolled in at just under 4 feet and damaged marinas and private boats in Marin County.

The Cascadia subduction zone, which runs roughly from Mendocino County to Vancouver Island, could also produce a massive earthquake and tsunami. But Geist says it’s unclear how a tsunami from “The Really Big One” would affect the Bay Area.

“Oregon, Washington and California north of Eureka would really bear the brunt of that tsunami,” he explains.

But What If a Big One Arrived?

Although it’s unlikely, Steven Ward, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, has created a series of animations to show how a big tsunami might spread through San Francisco Bay.

In Ward’s simulations, the incoming wave stands just over 16 feet tall. This is much larger than historical tsunamis, but Geist agrees that a wave this size is theoretically possible.

https://youtu.be/bP_AIWgknfI

Approaching the Golden Gate at 55 mph, the wave would first hit the outlying areas of Point Reyes National Seashore and Montara. It would then start to flood low-lying areas like Half Moon Bay.

“It’s not like splash and dash,” explains Ward. “When the water comes in, it’s going to flood.”

It would feel like a 12-hour tidal cycle was packed into an hour.

“And it will do as much damage when it goes back out and drags along cars and debris,” he adds.

The original wave and splashbacks from shore would then start to pile up as they squeeze through the 1-mile-wide Golden Gate. In Ward’s simulations, the wave reaches a maximum height of about 30 feet.

“That’s barely to the top the pylon,” says Ward, who is confident that the bridge would have no trouble withstanding the wave energy. “It probably wouldn’t even touch the steel.”

Finally, the wave would fan out into San Francisco Bay. Parts of Crissy Field, Mission Bay and the Marina could see significant flooding, but by the time it reached Treasure Island or the East Bay, the wave would be less than 3 feet tall. It would probably not even make it to the South Bay.

Verdict: The Bay Area Is Relatively Safe

Steven Horowitz, who asked Bay Curious the question, was glad to hear that the tsunami would be nothing like the movie.

“By the time it gets to Berkeley, which is where I’m sitting right now, I think I’m pretty safe,” he says. “Sounds like it’s not going to come rushing up University Avenue.”

Bay Area residents can also rest assured that there have been no recorded deaths from tsunami-related events in San Francisco. And even a worst-case-scenario Cascadia tsunami would take several hours to reach the city, providing ample time to mobilize a response.

And just in case, the City and County of San Francisco has a tsunami plan in place. It includes a strategy for evacuating people from vulnerable areas like Ocean Beach, coordinating basic services (like shelter, water, food, and medical attention) and performing search and rescue.

Still, “if you get a warning and are in a tsunami zone, follow the evacuation instructions,” says Ward. “What do you have to lose, a couple hours of your time?”

]]>You may have seen a tsunami hit San Francisco in a movie, but what would it really be like?Our question-asker saw a tsunami hit San Francisco in the movie San Andreas, and wonders: would it really be like?<br />
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Reported by Johanna Varner and Olivia Allen-Price. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Vinnee Tong, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.<br />
<br />KQEDclean8:41What’s With the Bison in Golden Gate Park?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/08/whats-with-the-bison-in-golden-gate-park/
Thu, 08 Jun 2017 07:01:25 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11495697?updated=trueThe first one was brought to the park in 1891. It was soon joined by more bison from private and public herds.Take a stroll through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and you’re bound to come across something interesting. There’s a pair of windmills that look like they belong in the Dutch countryside, and through an elaborate gate you’ll find the oldest public Japanese Tea Garden in the United States. But perhaps the wildest treasure in the park is the herd of six American bison.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7hbu_pGErw

Seeing the animals in the park is unexpected, says Bay Curious listener Paul Irving. After all, bison aren’t native to San Francisco, and they certainly stand out in today’s urban setting. After years of cycling past the paddock, Irving asked Bay Curious:

“What’s the story behind the bison in Golden Gate Park?”

The answer goes back hundreds of years.

In the 1500s, an estimated 30 million to 60 million bison roamed American prairies. They grazed all over the West, from northern Mexico up through Canada.

As European Americans expanded into the West, the bison’s habitat was chopped up by railroads, or turned into farms. Imported cattle brought grazing competition and new diseases to the bison. But the greatest threat to bison was hunting. Bison meat was exported or eaten on the spot, skins were sent to commercial tanneries, and bones were ground up to make things like fertilizer and bone china.

Bison were also killed for sport. Competitions were held to see who could kill the most bison (it was at one of these competitions that Buffalo Bill actually got his nickname). Tourists on trains would shoot the animals from their seats, leaving the carcasses where they fell. In 1973, a railway engineer in Santa Fe said it was possible to walk 100 miles along the railroad by stepping from one bison carcass to another.

While the U.S. government clashed with Native Americans over land, the army encouraged the rampant slaughter of bison, which were an important native resource. One colonel even said to hunters, “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

By 1889, the estimated number of bison had dwindled to about 1,000.

The Bison Come to Golden Gate Park

It was around this time that work began on Golden Gate Park.

Bison Facts

A male bison tips the scale at 2,000 pounds and females can weigh around 1,000 pounds.

In 2016 President Obama named the American Bison as the United State’s official mammal.

Bison can use their heads as snowplows, allowing them to discover food beneath feet of snow.

When bison were close to extinction, inbreeding concerns led many to be bred with cows, which explains why most of the bison we see today have a little cow in them.

Though the names are often used interchangeably, bison and buffalo are different animals. Buffalo are a species native to Africa and Asia, while bison are specific to North America and parts of Europe.

“When Golden Gate Park was created, the idea was to honor the Wild West,” says Phil Ginsburg, general manager of San Francisco Recreation and Parks.

To recreate the Wild West, the park needed bison.

The first one was brought to the park in 1891. It was soon joined by more bison from private and public herds.

“Bison and several other animals were actually first put in a paddock which is very close to where Kezar Stadium is today,” Ginsburg says.

The zoo had a captive breeding program that produced more than 100 bison calves, though the program has since ended.

Over the decades, conservation efforts (and ironically, an increased interest in bison meat) have brought the North American bison population back into the hundreds of thousands.

Today’s Herd

The bison currently living in the pen are not descended from the original animals brought to the park. The bison were replaced by a younger herd in 1984 and again in 2011.

Today, all the bison in the paddock are female. Their names are Betsy, Bailey, Bellatrix, Buttercup, Bambi and Brunhilda.

“Having all females just keeps everything a little bit more calm,” says Ginsburg.

When there were bulls, the bison could get aggressive. One tried to maul a policeman on horseback and another tried to escape by running into the Sunset District.

“Males become very aggressive around August because they’re fighting for dominance in order to breed with the females,” says Sarah King of the San Francisco Zoo, which takes care of the animals. “Then calves are generally born in the spring, nine months later, and that’s when the females get aggressive because they’re very protective of their offspring.”

Though they may appear to be slow, bison are powerful creatures. They can run over 30 mph, jump up to 6 feet in the air, and swim over half a mile, says King.

These days the paddock is calm. On any given day you can see the bison either grazing or resting. Most of the excitement in the paddock is human-generated. For example: the streaker who was arrested for running into the paddock during Bay to Breakers.

]]>The first one was brought to the park in 1891. It was soon joined by more bison from private and public herds.Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean7:52What Dinosaurs Roamed the Bay Area?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/01/what-dinosaurs-roamed-the-bay-area/
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 07:01:30 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11487363?updated=trueThe answer is satisfyingly full of toothy prehistoric beasts.olten Wong, a shy 5-year-old from Daly City, loves dinosaurs. He draws them, goes with his family to museums, wears dinosaur shirts, and has tons of dinosaur books and toys.

At last year’s Bay Area Science Festival, Kolten asked Bay Curious: What sort of dinosaurs roamed the Bay Area? And are there fossils here?

The answer is satisfyingly full of toothy prehistoric beasts. But before we get to those, we need to explain a bit about the Bay Area during the Mesozoic era — the geologic time of the dinosaurs, ending with their sudden extinction 66 million years ago.

Mesozoic Bay Area

The California coastline was 100 miles farther east, toward the Sierra Foothills, putting the Bay Area thousands of feet underwater. And much of our ancient seafloor is long gone.

Over millions of years, the Farallon Plate subducted into an underwater trench, melting under the continent. This, along with frequent earthquakes and underwater landslides, meant bad news for ancient bones we’d like to find today.

“This would shake a skeleton apart, and the sediments being dragged down into a zone where heat and pressure would metamorphose them—all of this argues you wouldn’t get much preserved,” Sloan says.

So you won’t find many fossils in the Bay Area — though a few have survived.

In the Marin Headlands, you can find reddish chert made up of tiny prehistoric shells of radiolarians — think of plankton. A few larger spiral shells from extinct mollusks have also turned up; these belonged to ammonites, which swam through the water kind of like the modern-day nautilus.

But to find evidence of the predators that ate those ammonites, you have to look closer to the prehistoric shoreline to the east.

Our Aquatic Beasts

Northeast of Sacramento, in Rocklin, Dick Hilton is co-chair of the Sierra College Natural History Museum. Hilton authored the 3.4-pound “Dinosaurs and Other Mesozoic Reptiles of California,” and is careful to say that many of the superb beasts above what’s now San Francisco were not exactly dinosaurs per se.

Dinosaurs, he explains, are terrestrial — land dwelling. So a Mesozoic creature swimming through the modern-day bay’s waters or flying overhead wouldn’t qualify. There are also taxonomic distinctions to do with skulls and hip structure.

Still, Hilton says, all kinds of gnarly reptiles that weren’t dinosaurs swam along the coast, like one that resembled a dolphin — if dolphins were terrifying reptiles. Known as ichthyosaurus, the name literally means fish lizard.

Another toothy carnivore upwards of 30 feet long was mosasaurus.

“If you saw the latest Jurassic Park movie, one of these comes out of the water and scares the heck out of you, doesn’t it?” Hilton remarks. Indeed. Mosasaur fossils have been found just a few miles from Sierra College.

Among the favorites of Kolten, our young question asker, is another sometimes found in California called plesiosaurus.

Plesiosaurs had four flippers, long necks and sharp teeth. Their fossils sometimes turn up with rocks inside the rib cage. Hilton believes they swallowed the rocks to attain neutral buoyancy.

“You don’t wanna sink to the bottom, you don’t wanna float to the top, so if you can swallow just enough rocks and keep them in your body, then you’re neutrally buoyant and you just glide through the ocean,” he says.

There were also pterosaurs, the flying family of the iconic pterodactyl and its cousin, the pteranodon.

“The largest ones may have had a wingspan of around 40 feet, so we’re talking of a flying reptile here the size of a jet fighter,” Hilton smiles, “which is pretty cool.” (Fact check: accurate.)

While the bay’s jumbled, messy geology makes it difficult to find definitive fossil evidence, Hilton is convinced they were around.

“It’s like today. You go along the coastline and you’re liable to see whales. And they stay usually fairly close to the coastline. But you can go out on a boat 500 miles from the shore and still see whales and still see birds, just probably not as numerous,” he says.

As for actual dinosaurs in California, much of what’s found are fragments — a finger or two here, a scrap of leg there. The only California fossil suggesting a meat-eating dinosaur once lived here is on display in Hilton’s museum: a dark gray chunk of theropod leg small enough to hold in your palm.

Of the few largely intact dinosaur skeletons found in the state, one belonged to a duck-billed plant eater known as Augustynolophus morrisi. State lawmakers are considering a bill this year to make it California’s state dinosaur.

]]>The answer is satisfyingly full of toothy prehistoric beasts.The answer is satisfyingly full of toothy prehistoric beasts. <br />
<br />
Reported by Daniel Potter. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson and Jessica Placzek. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean9:46You Live in S.F. and Your Home Was Built in 1906: True or False?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/25/you-live-in-san-francisco-and-your-home-was-built-in-1906-true-or-false/
Thu, 25 May 2017 07:01:23 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11475826?updated=trueMany building records went up in smoke after the city was devastated by the Great Quake and Fire.Ask around in the more historic parts of San Francisco and you’ll find a good number of the homes were built in 1906. Or so people have been told.

One of our Bay Curious listeners, Scott Sharpe, couldn’t help but notice how often that date popped up when he and his wife went house hunting.

They ended up buying a condo on Grant Avenue in North Beach and the records for his building say — no surprise — 1906.

Scott knew about the earthquake and the fires. But he also had heard rumors that his building was older than its 1906 date. His upstairs neighbor thought sailors might have rented rooms in the long narrow buildings on his block when they came ashore in San Francisco.

That got him wondering …

What proportion of houses in his neighborhood and other neighborhoods actually have been around for much longer than we have records for?

And also, was his building older than 1906? Was it a boardinghouse for sailors?

Let’s find out.

On April 18, 1906, a massive earthquake tore through roughly 300 miles up and down the San Andreas Fault.

The epicenter of this enormous temblor was near San Francisco. It brought down buildings, and the fires it caused burned for three days. By the end of the nightmare, roughly 80 percent of the most populated part of the city was destroyed. An estimated 28,000 buildings in the burn area of North Beach, the downtown area, along Van Ness Avenue and the Mission were lost. A quarter-million people, more than half the city, were homeless. On top of all that misery, while exact numbers remain unknown, around 3,000 people are thought to have died. Numbers remain hard to determine, but math leads us to believe that 7,000 buildings might have survived.

Another loss from the quake and fires — a loss that we still feel today: documents. Volumes of building records, deeds to homes, contracts, parcel histories and the like went up in smoke those three days.

As a result, much of the historic part of the city received a second birthday: 1906. While San Francisco was formally incorporated April 15, 1850, much of it was destroyed 56 years later, on April 18, 19 and 20. But with money in the bank and bodies ready to work, all the rebuilding was a rebirth of sorts. And a new date of 1906 was slapped on much of the city.

That gets us back to the search for an answer to Scott’s question, and a trip to the city history center and archives on the sixth floor of the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Make no mistake. This is no musty, dank setup. These archives, just like the library itself, are light and airy, and accessible. City archivist Susan Goldstein and her crew are there to help me every step of the way, and I ask her Scott’s first question: What proportion of the city’s homes are older than their build date of 1906?

We speculate that roughly 7,000 buildings survived. She explains that this question is one that will take quite a while as it will require serious data digging and compilation, as well as follow-up on the status of those 7,000 or so homes and buildings. It’s doable, but requires more time that Bay Curious can invest. But we can dig into Scott’s second question.

Is his building older than its 1906 “birthdate”?

I ask Goldstein how we research this, given that the city’s documents burned in the fires. This is when she offers a golden nugget.

“People think we’ve lost all the records. That’s really not true.”

Many of the city’s building records did burn. But not all of them. While documents about ownership, deeds and the like may have burned, there are many other types of records that were distributed around town in different places that did survive.

Goldstein said, “For example, there’s a wealth of information in the water tap records.” Those are the ledgers dating back to the mid-19th century that document when and where water was hooked up to a home or building. From that we learn the names associated with a building, about the buildings, and interestingly the order in which buildings were put in place. So while they may not be in order on any given street, the water hookups, or water tap records, reveal the order in which the houses or buildings appear on a street.

Those ledgers are at the library in hard copy and digitized. The digitized version offers photos of the ledgers, so either way it’s a trip back in time with a glimpse at the old-fashioned handwriting and the ink blots on the pages.

The archives also have Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. With colorful drawings, they paint a picture of what was on any given street and even the outlines of the buildings and hints at the interiors. The building materials used are included.

There are block books that show an entire block’s buildings. There are loads of maps, as well as 44,000 photos of old San Francisco that did NOT burn. So, the myth that all the documents burned is dispelled.

With that, we know we have different options for finding out what was on Scott’s place in 1906.

Goldstein is looking through the water tap records, through some cross-street reference guides, and a few other spots. No luck. She and her colleagues remember that Grant Avenue used to go by the name Dupont — and that leads to success.

Goldstein then turns to the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, which end up being a goldmine and show us what, in 1905, was on the spot where Scott lives now.

And, you know what? It does not look like what’s there now. But that’s cool, too! The building footprint today is different from 1905, when the Sanborn Fire Maps were drawn. What’s there on the page shows what looks like mixed-use strip of shops with flats on top. And we can almost see in our mind’s eye what was there. There are three shops joined together like a strip mall, and then a second-floor flat for each shop.

And the maps even give us clues about the shop’s business. One was a furniture repair shop. That was easy — it said so on the map. Next to that was what may have been a bakery or a potter’s shop because the oven was so large it shows up on the map. And where Scott’s building is, it’s harder to tell. But atop each shop is a flat with two large rooms. Nothing looks like the rooms that Scott described for the boardinghouse rooms in which he imagined the sailors stayed.

So, sorry, Scott. From what the Fire Insurance maps show, it doesn’t appear that your building predates the fire. Perhaps it really was built in the flurry of construction in 1906. It was a popular birthdate, after all!

One more thing. Archivist Susan Goldstein invites anyone curious to learn more about the history of a house or building to come down to the sixth floor of San Francisco’s Main Library on Larkin Street and start digging. It’s there for the public to enjoy!

]]>Many building records went up in smoke after the city was devastated by the Great Quake and Fire.Ask around in the more historic parts of San Francisco and you’ll find a good number of the homes were built in 1906. Or so people have been told.<br />
<br />
Reported by Penny Nelson. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean6:07Are Plastic Bag Bans Actually Helping the Environment?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/18/are-plastic-bag-bans-good-for-the-environment/
Thu, 18 May 2017 07:01:17 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11461251?updated=trueThe state plastic bag ban will likely lead to a decrease in single-use bags. But what do people use instead?“Do you need a bag?”

Since November, when California became the first state to ban single-use plastic bags, it’s a question you have to answer almost every time you go to the store. And you have to ask yourself: Am I willing to pay 10 cents for a bag?

It’s also a question that made 12-year-old Amar Farhat have a question of her own.

“Is banning plastic bags making a difference in the environment?”

Amar doesn’t just want to know if fewer bags are being used now, but also if the law is doing what it was meant to do: help the environment. She’s a little skeptical. Amar and her family used to reuse the old plastic bags for trash or errands. Plus, she said, the new thicker bags you get at the store seem to be made of more plastic, not less.

“I feel like it might help a little bit, but overall, we have so many plastic things, this is a small percentage,” she said.

What is the Plastic Bag Ban?

If plastic bags are banned, what are these thicker plastic bags Amar is getting from the grocery store?

It’s important to understand how the new statewide ban works. The law gets rid of single-use plastic bags — those thin, cheap plastic bags you used to get. It also requires grocery stores to charge 10 cents for paper bags or for new, thicker, reusable plastic bags. Those thicker plastic bags have to be made of partially recycled material and have to meet specific requirements. The state hopes that if these bags are heftier and bigger, you can use fewer of them at the checkout line and reuse them for longer.

This is one of the old bags:

This is one of the new bags:

You can also opt to bring your own bags or not take any bags at all.

Since the state law just went into effect, it’s too soon to know how it’s working, but there are hundreds of cities around California that already had their own plastic bag bans. If something different is happening at your grocery store, it might be because your local law varies slightly.

These cities can tell us how they’ve fared so far.

Are Fewer Bags Being Used Overall?

In 2013, Alameda County passed an ordinance very similar to the current state law.

“We’ve seen an 80 percent reduction in the number of bags — paper and plastic,” said Meri Soll, senior program manager at StopWaste. The agency oversees waste management in Alameda County

There are a number of ways Soll and her colleague, Jeff Becerra, measured the impact of the ordinance — but one of the most effective methods was surprisingly low-tech.

“We stood in a parking lot,” said Soll. “We just watched the consumers go out, how many bags did they have, what types of bags? Did they not have bags?”

And a year after the ordinance, they went back to those same stores at the same time and counted again. What they found was that twice as many people are bringing their own bags and almost three times as many simply don’t take a bag at all. The big differences have been that people are no longer taking bags when they buy one or two items, double-bagging items or taking extra free bags.

Here’s a chart StopWaste made:

Soll and Becerra didn’t just stand in parking lots, though. They also got the purchasing data from 69 chain stores in the county. Those stores went from using 50 million bags each year to using just 10 million total — paper and plastic. The number of paper bags used went from 13 million to 8 million, and the number of plastic bags went from 37 million to 2 million.

Alameda is not the only county that has attempted to measure the impact of its bag ban.

San Jose also measured the number of plastic bags found in litter and creek cleanups, and saw decreases.

California Waste Solutions, which does the majority of recycling for San Jose, reported fewer plastic bags getting caught in recycling machines and a 35-50 percent reduction in down time because of that.

Los Angeles County found its large stores gave away 2 million plastic bags and 196,000 paper bags annually before its ban. A year later, those stores handed out only 125,000 paper bags.

What cities have found is charging people for a bag makes a big difference. San Francisco’s original ordinance, which didn’t charge a fee, wasn’t nearly as effective as it is now. “People just take the free option then,” said Soll. “We found if you were giving one bag free and charging for the other, there would just be a switch” — not a decrease.

The 10-cent charge is why use of both paper and plastic decreased in places like Alameda County.

“The 10-cents charge actually really affects how the consumer behaves at point of sale,” said Soll. “A bag that used to be free and now you’re charging 10 cents actually gives the consumer pause. ‘Do I need this bag and next time I’m going to bring my own bag. I’m not going to pay that 10-cents charge.’ ”

In all likelihood, we’ll see similar drops statewide in single-use bags, though we can’t know for sure yet.

Is It Better for the Environment?

Amar, our question asker, also wanted to know if all these plastic bag bans are actually doing any good.

It comes down to two issues: How big a problem were plastic bags in the first place, and what are you using now instead?

Stephen Joseph is a lawyer for the plastic bag industry, and fought the bans. He also used to run an anti-litter group in San Francisco. He said plastic bags have gotten an unfair bad rap.

“It’s media sensationalism,” he said.

‘Plastic bag litter was so tiny that even after they banned plastic bags, there was no appreciable effect.’Lawyer Stephen Joseph

Plastic bags, he said, account for a tiny portion of overall litter. He rarely saw them when picking up trash. City litter surveys and beach cleanups actually confirm this. In San Jose’s pre-ban tally, plastic bags accounted for only about 2 percent of trash. And Eben Schwartz, from the Coastal Commission, said plastic bags were about 9 percent of what they picked up on San Francisco beaches before the local bans went into effect — and are about 6 percent of trash they pick up now.

“Plastic bag litter was so tiny that even after they banned plastic bags, there was no appreciable effect, because there’d been so little of it in the first place,” said Joseph, of San Francisco’s ban.

The bigger problem, said Joseph — what’s killing marine mammals and gathering in patches in the ocean — is “hard plastic.”

While researchers do find plastic bags in the stomachs of dead whales and turtles, what they find more often are: toothbrushes, golf balls, plastic water bottle caps, fishing debris.

But Schwartz said plastic bags are still a problem.

“They break down into smaller pieces of plastic. That doesn’t mean they’re less harmful. It just means there’s more plastic to be ingested,” he said. “You create little toxic pellets.”

Plus, the main reason environmental groups have focused on plastic bags is because they’re easy to replace.

“Is it really just a product we’re using for 37 seconds, for one minute, and then we’re throwing it away, and what we’re learning here is there is no away,” said Dan Jacobson, the state director for Environment California, who worked to pass the measure.

What Do You Use Instead?

When you think about how good or bad a bag is for the environment, you need to think about its whole life cycle— from how much energy it takes to produce to what happens after you throw it in the trash or the recycling bin.

Amar and her family used to reuse the old plastic bags to line trash cans and carry things to work. Lots of people used them for pet waste.

Many of the replacement bags take more resources to make than the old, single-use plastic bags. Paper bags are heavier, so they take more gas to ship. Canvas bags need to be washed, which uses water and energy. All of these factors mean a reusable bag must be used multiple times to have a net positive effect on the environment.

Here are how many uses are needed to equal one use of one of the old thin plastic bags:

REUSABLE BAG TYPE

# OF USES NEEDED

New reusable plastic bags at the grocery store (LDPE)

4.2

PET reusable plastic bags

10-11

Non-woven polypropylene fabric bags

11-13

Polyester bags

42

Cotton bag

131

A PET reusable plastic bag is the plastic square kind you can buy at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. A polypropylene bag is the semi-fabric boxlike kind often given out at expos or festivals. Cotton bags are the nice cotton totes you might buy for their cute design or charm.

“We do know that once you have a reusable bag and you’re using it over and over, the environmental savings always outweigh something that can be used once,” said Soll.

That’s especially true when those reusable bags are made from recycled materials. Even Joseph agreed with that.

“Fortunately, what they’re being replaced with today are to some extent recyclable polyethylene reusable bags,” said Joseph. “Then that’s good for the environment.”

We can’t know for sure what people will do, but if what happened at the local level happens at the state level, then we’ll end up using fewer plastic and fewer paper bags. And that should ultimately be enough fewer resources that the environment will come out ahead.

]]>The state plastic bag ban will likely lead to a decrease in single-use bags. But what do people use instead?California became the first state to ban single-use plastic bags in November. A middle-schooler from Sacramento wants to know if the ban actually helps the environment.KQEDclean8:55Can’t Get That Camping Spot? It Could Be Botshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/11/cant-get-that-camping-spot-it-could-be-bots/
Thu, 11 May 2017 07:00:27 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11450483?updated=trueSome people are using bots to get campsites at state and national parks. Is it legal? Is it fair?Abigail Johnston and Steve Fotter have been taking the same vacation for decades. For a week, twice a year, they pack up their car with sleeping bags, books and bug spray and drive an hour to Steep Ravine at Mount Tamalpais State Park.

Nestled along the coast of Marin County, down beneath the cliffs of the Pacific, they make their way to one of 10 primitive wooden cabins. There’s no electricity or running water, but luxury is not why people visit Steep Ravine. They go for the sweeping views of the ocean and a secluded beach a few steps away.

For Abigail and Steve, this state park is heaven on earth — a sanctuary they’ve been visiting since the cabins opened to the public in 1984. But it’s gotten tough to get a spot. Almost impossible.

When the registration window opens at 8 a.m. most cabins are booked by 8:01 a.m. Abigail and Steve have been trying to book a cabin for a year now, with no success.

Are others beating them through the reservation system? Or are they falling short because they’re competing against something not quite human: bots?

Bots

Bots are software that can automatically perform routine tasks on the internet. You’ve probably used a bot online and not even realized it, like when you search the web or look for cheap flights on sites like Kayak or Expedia, instead of having to check each airline yourself,

The bots go and pull all that information into one helpful place. But bots can also be used nefariously, such as taking down a website by overwhelming its servers and making it impossible for legitimate users to access the system.

I was unable to confirm if bots are reserving campsites, but they are certainly active on ReserveAmerica’s website.

Scraping For Availability

Chris Streeter is a software engineer living in San Francisco. He wanted a campsite for Easter weekend at another popular park, Big Basin Redwoods State Park. The place was 100 percent booked, but he kept checking the ReserveAmerica website for cancellations — a common strategy for snagging a last-minute spot.

“It involves going to reserveamerica.com, checking to see if there’s a site available. There’s not, so you have to keep coming back super often. I decided to automate the process,” says Streeter.

He built a bot that looks for cancellations on ReserveAmerica.

“Every 15 minutes [the bot] just checks. And if there’s a site, it posts a little notification in my Mac that says, ‘Hey, there’s a site available,’ ” says Streeter.

This bot is not the only one of its kind. There’s a bot for Yosemite, too.

The code for the Yosemite bot is posted on GitHub, a code-sharing website. Anyone who finds the code and understands it can use it. It was written by Brian Hansen, another computer engineer based in San Francisco. Hansen is a rock climber and, like most climbers, he sees Yosemite as a mecca.

“Most climbers I know will set alarms early on May 15th,” wrote Hansen via email. “I personally prefer more spontaneous trips, and was told that my only recourse was to refresh the recreation.gov website repeatedly until a campsite opened up due to cancellation.”

According to Hansen’s GitHub stats, people have been copying the bot.

Is It Legal?

The Better Online Ticket Sales Act (also called the BOTS Act) targets bots used for ticket scalping at events over a certain size, so the non-commercial personal-use bots built by Streeter and Hansen don’t qualify. Specialists in internet law say that these bots fall into a legal gray area.

The bots do violate the website contractors’ terms of use, which prohibit the use of robots, bots and scraping. However, in similar cases the terms of use were not found to be legally binding unless agreement to the terms of use was prominently displayed in a location where the users could not miss them.

According to Jeffrey Rosenfeld of KR Internet Law, “If users click to check a box saying they’ve read and agree to the terms and conditions, that would be considered legally binding.”

Even if it is legally binding, most prosecutors will only go after people who are trying to make money or steal business from the site.

“Unless you’re going to try to commercialize the website’s content, most businesses and website operators won’t care what you do,” says Rosenfeld.

When people do try to commercialize campsites, California State Parks has been quick to shut them down and threaten legal action under the California Penal Code. The last vendor the Parks shut down was called “Adventure Man.” Some vendors make big promises to get customers reservations at the most difficult campgrounds, but California State Parks representatives didn’t know if they used bots.

Andrea Matwyshyn specializes in technology and innovation policy at Northeastern University. She says Streeter’s and Hansen’s bots could also fall under unauthorized access, but that “in the 9th Circuit, it’s unlikely that this case would be pursued by prosecutors.”

Hansen has considered that his bot is in a legal gray area, but isn’t worried about prosecution because “it’s such a small project, but [the questionable legality] is why I haven’t made a real website out of this or pursued developing third-party reservation optimization much further,” Hansen wrote.

Is It Fair?

Some might say that Streeter and Hansen are problem-solving in an innovative way. Their bots create more free time and could potentially be the start of businesses that create jobs.

“The student body was very divided over whether they thought the students were cheating or if they were simply using their skills in an innovative way,” says Matwyshyn.

Bots have been used to gain advantage in the Bay Area restaurant scene, too. Tables at San Francisco restaurant State Bird Provisions have been a big target for bots. One company, TableSweep, even scrapes OpenTable for cancellations at top restaurants and charges customers $5 for every successfully booked reservation.

Matwyshyn believes there needs to be space for innovation, but if not everyone has the same access to technology, it raises a lot of questions.

“That’s a debate that we need to have as a society. And these questions of scraping data and aggregating and reusing [data] are our very entry point to those questions that are going to show up on steroids in the next 10 to 20 years,” says Matwyshyn.

Can We Stop It?

The contractor running reserveamerica.com would not return emails or calls requesting comment. But because they work for California State Parks, they did respond to Brian Ketterer, its southern field division chief.

“They said they have software that screens for bots. They were not aware of any infiltration into our reservation system,” says Ketterer.

A typical bot prevention measure might include adding a CAPTCHA (that’s the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”), but programmers have gotten around it by hiring real people to fill them out. Artificial intelligence can also be trained to fill out a CAPTCHA.

Another preventative measure could be two-step authentication. That’s when a website texts you a number that you must type into the site.

The parks could also move away from online reservations and back to booking things over the phone. Award-winning Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse said they’ve never noticed a bot problem and attribute it to the fact that most reservations are completed by phone. Paying for more man-hours could be costly, though.

This could also be tackled from the supply side. After all, these bots were a response to a scarce resource.

Increasing the Supply

“There are only 459 campsites in Yosemite Valley and over 4 million people visit the park each year,” says Yosemite ranger and representative Jamie Richards. “We are fully booked the entire summer and beyond.”

The California State Parks system isn’t much better.

“The real story here is a lack of inventory,” says Ketterer.

Almost 40 million people live in California and over 200 million visit the state as tourists each year. According to Ketterer, there are about 14,600 campsites and accommodations available by reservation.

“And if you look at those numbers, it’s not in your favor. It’s like playing the lottery” he says.

California has seen the number of reservations steadily increasing. In just the past year, reservations were up by 9 percent, says Ketterer, and parks can’t keep up with growing demand. They don’t have the budget to open and maintain new campsites.

It should also be noted that not all campgrounds are equally popular. According to Ketterer, coastal campsites with accommodations are the most difficult to snag. Even without bots, there is fierce competition.

“We’ve heard from people who have businesses using the employees in the office to sit by their computers and sit by their phones and try to get that reservation,” he says.

Even Ketterer has trouble getting a spot.

“I have yet to visit Crystal Cove State Park as a visitor and I would love to do that. I’ve also tried for Big Sur and I have yet to get into there. And I’ve tried for about five years.”

Have you heard of people using bots to get campsites? Have you heard of people using bots for other popular events or items? Send us an email at baycurious@kqed.org

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when the reservation window opens for the Steep Ravine cabins. It’s on the 1st of each month.

]]>Some people are using bots to get campsites at state and national parks. Is it legal? Is it fair?Some people are using bots to get campsites at state and national parks. Is it legal? Is it fair?<br />
<br />
Credits: Jessica Placzek, Olivia Allen-Price, Paul Lancour, Vinnee Tong, Julia McEvoyKQEDclean11:03It’s-It! The San Francisco Treat That Sparked a Cult Followinghttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/04/its-it-the-san-francisco-treat-that-sparked-a-cult-following/
Thu, 04 May 2017 13:00:24 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10710678?updated=trueSan Franciscans have been having a love-affair with this ice cream treat since 1928.San Franciscans have been having a love-affair with this ice cream treat since 1928. Bay Curious is a podcast from KQED that answers questions about the Bay Area.

t’s rare to meet a true San Francisco native. In a city almost completely overrun these days with advancement and development and the future, we find brief moments of peace and solace in anything that came before the first tech bubble burst.

My husband, Seth, and I are not natives. Far from it. He hails from Georgia and I from Colorado. I moved to the Bay Area three years ago, and I often find myself trying to puzzle out the “real” San Francisco.

I first heard about It’s-It ice cream bars from my sister-in-law. She was the first to mention them, but then everyone worth their San Francisco salt had a word to describe the bars: intrinsic, essential, authentic, old-school San Francisco, I was told.

It’s-It belongs to a different era. In 1928, George Whitney, manager of a well-loved, long gone Ocean Beach amusement park, Playland, invented a soon-to-be classic. The It’s-It: cookie, ice cream, cookie, chocolate.

The sandwich has survived nearly 90 years. It’s seen the construction of the both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge; witnessed the New York Giants move to San Francisco; lived through the Summer of Love, the rise and fall of the Beat Poets, the assassinations of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. That sandwich has felt earthquakes, won three World Series, and seen the city swell with pride and wealth and a bit of self-loathing following not one, but two tech booms.

The dessert has even endured multiple owners. In the 1970s, the original formula and name were sold to an immigrant with an eye on the American Dream: Mr. Charles Shamieh. He didn’t quite stick to the recipe — he made it his own — but the concept, the name, the title it had earned, that bit of original San Francisco, is still tucked between those cookie walls.

Listen to the track below for more on It’s-It history and our trip to the factory.

Last summer, It’s-It announced the introduction of two new flavors to the classically short list of options: pumpkin and strawberry. So we went to the factory. We met the Shamieh family. We saw nothing. We went all the way to Burlingame, and were told that no one gets to see inside the It’s-It factory.

So we took to the streets. We wanted to see what people really think about It’s-Its, and if they’d care at all about the change.

Almost every person we stopped on the street had an opinion. Most of them had tried the ice cream sandwich at one point or another during their time in San Francisco. Some had routines that included the ice cream in their weekly, or nightly, schedule. Some remembered childhoods filled with family and that particular treat.

Tatiana Rivera, 22, told us she’s been eating vanilla It’s-Its since she was seven years old. We asked her if she always gets the vanilla, and she said yes. “I just can’t get over it,” she said.

Steve Cox told us, “This is personal. I’ve been having an affair with It’s-It for 17 years.”

“It’s a treat — a San Francisco treat,” said John Stillwater. “It’s good. Nothing super special. It’s not gonna change your life. It’s just a yummy little ice cream sandwich.”

]]>San Franciscans have been having a love-affair with this ice cream treat since 1928.San Franciscans have been having a love-affair with this ice cream treat since 1928.<br />
<br />
Reported by Alyssa Kapnik Samuel and Seth Samuel. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Penny Nelson, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Our managing editor is Ethan Lindsey. Vice President for News is Holly Kernan. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean5:51Who’s Behind the Colorful Lights at San Francisco City Hall?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/04/27/whos-behind-the-colorful-lights-at-san-francisco-city-hall/
Thu, 27 Apr 2017 07:02:23 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11428075?updated=trueIt used to take hours or days to change the lights at City Hall. Now it's done with a few clicks.ay Curious listener Katie Emigh loves walking by San Francisco’s City Hall after sunset. The building’s ominous granite exterior is lit up dramatically every night. Most nights the lights are white. But there are special days when City Hall takes on a whole new look.

For Pride Week, it glowed in all the colors of the rainbow. After Prince died, it was bathed in purple. On St. Paddy’s Day, City Hall turned a radiant shamrock green.

“It’s such a symbol of San Francisco, and has become more of a symbol as time’s gone on,” Katie says as she stands before City Hall.

With her favorite San Francisco building in mind, Katie had a question for Bay Curious:

“I was always just curious who decides what the lights are going to be at City Hall — and who does them?”

City Hall History

Most city halls are landmarks, it’s true. But our City Hall is even more iconic than your average civic building — one with a history that makes its special luminous hues even more meaningful.

Built in 1915, in the neoclassical style, it rises more than the length of a football field into the San Francisco sky. At 307 feet, it’s taller than the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., and features 240 windows.

For generations of San Franciscans, City Hall has long been a symbol of political and social change.

It was here that former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom unleashed a watershed legal and political tempest when he issued marriage licenses to gay couples in 2004, putting the nation on notice when he said, “As California goes, so goes the nation.”

They go with red, white and blue for Election Day and rainbow colors for Pride Week. But sometimes the colors that shine are a little less obvious. Blue on an ordinary February evening? Red tones amid a windy September night?

Turns out City Hall can be rented for private events, and paying clients get to decide City Hall’s lighting scheme.

“It used to happen less, and now it seems to happen more frequently,” she says.

Katie’s right. City Hall goes all-aglow more often now. The older lighting system made changing colors a big challenge.

Funding for the $2.5 million project came from a combination of private donations and city funds.

“We would have to send a team of electricians and our station engineers out on the second floor of this building and manually change each of the 220 exterior lights with these gel caps,” says Kelly. “That process could take days. And they were incandescent lights, so they burned a lot of energy.”

Each time there was a lighting change it cost about $5,000 to create a new color scheme, so it didn’t happen very often.

But two years ago, City Hall celebrated a milestone — its 100th birthday.

Changing the colors of the lights got a lot easier. Instead of hiring a full work crew to make the alterations by hand, now one man makes it shine — Norm Goldwyn, IT Director of the City and County of San Francisco.

Goldwyn works his magic in a dark, cramped room far below the rattle and hubbub of the San Francisco streets above. Some might call him an artist. Instead of a brush he uses a mouse. His canvas is a piece of granite. And his paint palette – it’s a computer screen.

In his windowless lab downstairs, Goldwyn gets to do what he calls “probably one of the funnest parts of my job.”

The room is cluttered. Old boxes, a table, some steel machinery, a piece of granite and one of the new LED light fixtures sit amid the mess. He quickly goes to work and explains his process.

“I grab a computer and hook it up to a light fixture, and then I can adjust the sliders until I can find the exact color combination that makes sense for that particular special occasion,” he says.

But getting the colors right can be tricky, since they look different on a laptop than they do shining on the City Hall facade. For this, he has a real-world solution — that slab of granite on the basement floor.

“This is an example of the granite we use on the outside of City Hall,” he says, positioning the stone just right. “So when we finally take a color idea, we can shine it on the sample material here and see what color, with our own eyes, it’s really going to look like.”

And with a quick touch on a laptop keyboard, the whole space is suddenly lit up green. A shamrock green to be precise. Other nights, the dark basement radiates in Women’s March pink or Warriors blue and gold.

But getting the colors just right isn’t as easy as you might think.

“It took us a lot of tries to get Giants orange looking orange, as opposed to red or yellow,” admits Goldwyn. “And most people don’t actually know what they want. They just want blue. But they don’t think about Sky Blue, Carolina Blue, Deep Indigo. They just say, ‘I want blue.’ ”

Goldwyn can adjust for 16 million hues. The colors can also be set to change and move. And with the new technology also comes ease of use. The lights are programmed to go off and on with a touch of the hand and simple flip of a switch.

Outside, Katie admires the work of the man in the basement down below.

“Norm really did it tonight. He really killed it with the green,” she says. “It’s inspiring, because it’s less bureaucratic than I thought it would be, less people involved than I thought it would be. That this small group of people are able to represent these moments for the city, that really show this beautiful civic monument, is absolutely wonderful.”

As she heads off into the San Francisco night, she turns to say one last thing.

“Do you want to know the next great moment I’m looking forward to City Hall shining bright for? Giants orange, baby!”

It’s a good thing Norm Goldwyn already has the right shade of orange all figured out. Not too red. Not too yellow.

]]>It used to take hours or days to change the lights at City Hall. Now it's done with a few clicks.It used to take hours or days to change the lights at city hall lights. Now it's done with a few clicks. <br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean8:56What Makes San Francisco Sourdough Unique?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/04/20/what-makes-san-francisco-sourdough-unique/
Thu, 20 Apr 2017 07:01:16 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11401794?updated=trueWhen it comes to the mecca of sourdough, separating scientific fact from lore means breaking a few taboos.If bagels are a New York thing, San Francisco definitely has sourdough. And probably no one has convinced more people that our sourdough is unique than Boudin Bakery, where tourists line up at Fisherman’s Wharf for a taste of that moist-tangy, fogbound delight.

Bay Area native (and KQED staffer) Peter Cavagnaro has been eating local sourdough all his life. It’s his favorite bread. And that got him wondering about something. He asked Bay Curious….

“What makes San Francisco sourdough so unique?”

Here at KQED, we’ve always heard there’s something in the water or the air that makes our sourdough special. But is that really true?

It turns out that this is as much a science question as it is about the history and local mythology of our “authentic” local sourdough. By the time I had the answer, I also had 2 pounds of smelly homemade sourdough starter fermenting at home, and the results of a lab test that described the microbes living in it.

Taste the Microbes

To understand what makes our bread taste the way it does, you need to know how bread gets started. My investigation began in the fermentation room at Semifreddi’s bakery in Alameda, one of the best-known local producers of sourdough, along with Acme Bread Company and Tartine Bakery.

The fermentation room is the inner sanctum of the bakery. It’s a very cold, stainless-steel vault where 300 yellow buckets brim with slow-bubbling beige goop: future sourdough. I stood there, shivering in a hairnet, with co-owner Mike Rose and head baker John Tredgold.

Rose is a soft-spoken man who talks about sourdough with wonderment, as if it’s alive — which it is, with millions of microbes.

“Can you hear it? It’s hungry,” Rose said. “It will be fed later today. It gets fed once a day. Equal parts flour and water.”

Before sourdough gets baked, it has to be grown. Born as a primordial glop, aptly called starter. All it needs to grow, as Rose said, is flour and water. And time. That’s it. If you add anything else, it’s not real sourdough. Eventually, the sugars in the flour start to break down, and fermentation happens on its own.

Tredgold handed me a plastic spoon and pointed me to a bucket. I could see bubbles rising to the surface of the bucket — a sure sign of microbial activity. The starter tasted like very sour yogurt to me, but Tredgold treated the experience like tasting a fine wine, smelling and savoring.

“This is more like creme fraiche,” he said. “It makes you salivate, it makes you excited to eat more.”

Flour, Water, Temperature, Time

Semifreddi’s produces 9,500 loaves of sourdough each day. But no two loaves taste exactly alike. And that’s because the starter is alive with millions of wild yeast cells and naturally occurring bacteria. The yeast makes the bread rise. And the bacteria create the acids that make the bread sour.

The flavors vary from day to day, and batch to batch. Sourdough is one of the most ancient breads, dating back at least 5,000 years. It’s reasonably easy to create a starter from scratch, but tricky to master the triple arts of crust, crumb and flavor when baking. So much depends on capturing enough wild yeast to make the bread light and airy. (Adding commercial yeast is not a permitted technique at the baking stage if the goal is authentic, old-fashioned sourdough).

“We try to control it by temperature and time. And our hands. It’s never fully totally under control, because we’re dealing with natural organisms,” said Rose. “I love it,” he added with a grin.

Rose was so passionate that I decided to try growing my own sourdough starter at home (more on that below).

The Boudin Lore

A little voice nagged at me, though. Anyone can make sourdough, but would it be authentic if it wasn’t born in San Francisco? (I live in Oakland).

No one has convinced more people about the unique qualities of San Francisco sourdough than Boudin, which says it’s been selling the same loaf of bread for 168 years. According to the Boudin Bakery museum at Fisherman’s Wharf, the company’s mother dough follows an unbroken line back to the Gold Rush in 1849. Louise Boudin even saved the starter from a burning building in the 1906 earthquake.

A museum docent told me the starter is so special and irreplaceable that the Boudin mothership sends its retail stores fresh starter every 23 days. Without it, they say the sourdough those stores produce would stop tasting like San Francisco sourdough and start tasting like San Diego or Sacramento sourdough.

Why? Well, according to the museum, Boudin bread owes its special flavor to a strain of bacteria that thrives only in San Francisco’s climate. Scientists identified it here in 1970, so they named it Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.

Not That Unique, Actually

It’s a great story. Too bad it’s not quite true.

Scientists did identify Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis here. But recent studies have found it in up to 90 percent of countries where sourdough is produced. So from a biological standpoint, San Francisco sourdough is not all that distinctive.

“It’s something that everyone thinks is unique to San Francisco and that is not true at all,” said Ben Wolfe, a microbiologist at Tufts University in Boston. His lab studies fermentation full time … including the microbes you find in sourdough.

So, case closed? Not quite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5xOpss4j5E&t=56s

Science is still learning about the lactic acid bacteria (like L. sanfranciscensis) that give sourdough its main sour flavor. Other fermented foods have lactic acids, too, like miso, yogurt and kimchi.

But scientists don’t know where they come from. Or how they get into your sourdough starter when you make it in your kitchen.

One explanation is that the bacteria could be in the flour to begin with. So when you go to the store and buy a bag of flour, it’s not sterile. They could also be on your skin or floating around your kitchen, but Wolfe says those are less likely to become the dominant bacteria in your starter.

“This is one of the big questions we’re trying to answer in our story of American sourdough: Where are the lactic acid bacteria coming from?” said Wolfe.

The Sourdough Project

There’s never been a large-scale study in home kitchens to really identify the sources of bacteria at home.

Until now.

Wolfe’s lab has partnered with the Rob Dunn Lab at North Carolina State University on the Sourdough Project, the first comprehensive effort to test the DNA of sourdough starters across America — and understand the evolutionary biology that underlies the differences among starters.

The Sourdough Project is soliciting hundreds of sourdough starter samples from amateur and professional bread bakers across the country. (To participate in this public science project, get started by filling out this questionnaire).

Scientists will analyze samples to answer the baseline question: How variable are the microbes from region to region? And how much variability can be attributed to the grain of the bread, versus the air, the water or the humans involved?

There are so many factors. Wolfe ticks them off.

“It could be the time that people ferment their breads. It could be the temperature. It could be a special set of recipes used in San Francisco than in other places.”

When I told him I was growing my own sourdough starter, he offered to analyze it.

So while science may yet discover something special is lurking in our sourdough, Wolfe isn’t holding his breath.

Not even the bakers at Semifreddi’s, a company that has been in a position to benefit from the reputation of local sourdough, embrace the cachet.

Semifreddi’s head baker Tredgold says it’s pure marketing.

“It sells the city. It’s one of the things the city’s known for. The bridge, the bay, the sourdough.”

And Rose, the co-owner of the bakery, added: “If we take our local starter and bake with it in Los Angeles, I think it will taste very similar to what we’re making here,” he said.

Blasphemy! But possibly … true.

My Kitchen Sourdough Experiment: Results

My own sourdough experiment lasted more than a month. I used King Arthur whole wheat flour and kept my mixture on the kitchen counter. As it grew, it smelled distressingly like vomit before it mellowed. At one point it almost spilled out of the Tupperware I’d been keeping it in.

As my starter matured, it needed to be fed twice a day on a regular schedule. I raced home from work to give it more flour and water, spoke to it, and pampered it with field trips out to the balcony to give it some exposure to the Oakland atmosphere. (In spite of what I learned about the uncertainty of the science of microbes in sourdough, I still pictured my starter capturing beneficial wild yeast and bacteria from the atmosphere.)

I don’t have pets or children, so I took photos of my starter’s regular maturity and forced my friends to admire them.

But the most important question was: How did it taste? I baked two little loaves and brought them into the KQED newsroom to get some brutally honest feedback from fellow reporters.

Being a first-time baker, you can imagine how this went. The loaves were so dense they had almost no air pockets. They weighed at least 3 pounds and were nearly rock-hard. My colleagues at KQED charitably praised the taste, but it was clear something had gone wrong in the baking process … or with the starter itself.

A few weeks later, I got my sourdough DNA results back from Ben Wolfe’s Tufts lab. My starter had two bacterial species: Lactobacillus brevis and Lactobacillus plantarum; and one yeast species: Wickerhamomyces anomalus. All of which are very commonly found in sourdough starters made around the world, according to Wolfe. It’s also common to have no more than a few species of yeast and bacteria in any given starter.

But that one bacterium once believed to make our bread so special — Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis? My bread didn’t have any. Would things have gone differently if it had shown up? I may never know.

]]>When it comes to the mecca of sourdough, separating scientific fact from lore means breaking a few taboos.Reported by Julia Scott. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Jessica Placzek, Penny Nelson and Julia McEvoy. <br />
<br />
Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean10:21Why Do Giants Fans Hate the Wave? Oakland Started It.https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/04/13/the-wave-was-born-in-oakland-and-some-giants-fans-want-it-dead/
Thu, 13 Apr 2017 07:01:43 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10608660?updated=trueSan Francisco fans have had an unofficial no-wave policy forever. Why do they reject a cheer so many embrace?KQED listener Chris Thompson is an avid A’s fan who recently found himself at a Giants game with work colleagues. He noticed fans a few rows away trying to get the wave started, but saw they were quickly booed by other Giants fans. Eventually ushers came over and told the group trying to start the wave to simmer down.

Thompson wrote to Bay Curious asking:

Why don’t they allow people to do the wave at Giants stadium?

First thing we have to get cleared up right away — there is no official policy against the wave at Giants games. It’s a self-imposed ban that has been a part of Giants fan culture for decades.

But why? I mean, it’s the wave. At many stadiums, it’s as much a part of baseball as hot dogs and beer.

The Oakland Athletics Started It

Some Giants fans point back to the origins of the wave on Oct. 15, 1981, as the reason they developed a no-wave tradition.

The Athletics were battling the Yankees for the American League Championship, and things were not going well for Oakland. The A’s were down by two games in a best-of-five series, and were scoreless five innings into the game.

That’s when a professional cheerleader called Krazy George decided to unveil a cheer he’d been developing at local high school pep rallies.

Watch our video of Krazy George Henderson reliving the very first wave:

There is some dispute about whether or not Krazy George’s ’81 Oakland wave was in fact the first wave in history. Other claims point to the University of Washington or international soccer matches. But if you ask Krazy George, all of those other claims were either later than October 1981, or lack the proper supporting evidence of his nationally televised wave at the Oakland Coliseum.

“I say, ‘I don’t claim to have invented the wave. I DID INVENT THE WAVE.’ ”

Whether that’s definitive or not, the wave’s early connection to Oakland and the A’s is enough to turn some San Francisco Giants fans against it.

Bennett Dake came to a recent Giants game wearing a T-shirt he got in the ’80s. The back says: “Top 10 Reasons Real Fans Go to the ’Stick.” One reason? No wave.

“That’s Oakland,” he says. “We’re San Francisco. It’s always been like that. We don’t do the wave here.”

The Wave Was Associated With Los Angeles (and Thus, the Dodgers)

Though the wave might have started in Oakland, it was broadcast internationally for the first time during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Television sets across the world showed images of the crowd doing the wave at the soccer final — in many minds forever linking the cheer with that city.

“I think the wave is seen as something really Los Angeles, and it was San Francisco reacting to that,” says Dan Fost, author of two books about the Giants. “[The Dodgers fan] experience is all about beating the traffic, getting to the game late, leaving early and throwing beach balls around in the stands. And the wave is just such an L.A. part of that.”

It’s Too Mainstream

One identity trait that came up repeatedly during interviews with Giants fans was their feeling of uniqueness.

“Giants fans sort of think that they’re a little different, so we would never stoop to something as pedestrian as doing the wave,” says Pat Gallagher, who worked as the team’s director of marketing for nearly 33 years.

And let’s be honest, this identity goes beyond the baseball diamond. The San Francisco Bay Area as a whole has a long history of reveling in the ways it stands apart from the rest of America.

“Not doing the wave is a way of saying, ‘San Francisco is different and we don’t do that here,’ ” says Fost.

Need another example? Look no further than the Crazy Crab. At a time when baseball teams around the country were eagerly bringing cheery mascots into the mix, the Giants introduced an anti-mascot. The crustacean was a walking mascot parody, and fans were encouraged to boo, hiss and sometimes throw things at the poor schmuck stuck inside the costume.

Real Serious Fans Are Real Serious

Beyond tradition and perception, what is it about the wave that Giants fans dislike so much?

To put it simply, some people think that “real baseball fans” don’t do it. It’s seen as yet another frivolous ballpark novelty that detracts from their beloved pastime. Right up there with the Kiss Cam.

One Giants fan we spoke with says, “It’s an obnoxious response to fan excitement. I don’t like it. I think it’s silly.”

Real fans chart every pitch and obsess over fundamentals. Everyone else does the wave and eats cotton candy.

“Giants fans don’t do the wave because they are serious about baseball,” Fost says. “They love the game, they’re paying attention to the game, and they don’t want to take themselves out of the game.”

How the Tradition is Passed On

The Giants anti-wave philosophy is carried on as a sort of oral tradition. That is, via hearty “BOOOOOs.”

Gallagher says that when the team played at Candlestick, you’d often hear hardcore fans boo when anyone tried to start the wave.

“They weren’t booing the players, they were actually booing other fans,” he says.

It appears this tradition has made the trip from the ’Stick to AT&T Park.

Giants fan Dalton Hurst had a rude awakening at one of his childhood games.

“When I was a kid, I tried to start [the wave] and someone yelled at me,” says Hurst. “I don’t know why they don’t do it.”

But New Fans Doing The Wave?

Despite the booing, long-standing tradition and ’80s T-shirts — sacrilege — the wave has been spotted circling AT&T park recently. It may be that the team’s success is attracting new fans who just don’t know the rules yet.

Several die-hard fans blamed these bandwagon fans, (or “hipsters,” as one Giants fan called them) for bringing this abhorred tradition into their no-wave stadium.

Sharing our Findings

We took our findings back to Chris Thompson, the question-asker for this Bay Curious story. He couldn’t help but laugh.

“Are they proud to be that bourgeois?” he says of Giants fans. “This is baseball. … It’s waves and hot dogs and beers.”

To wave or not to wave? Sound off in the comments below.

Got a question you want to see the Bay Curious team take on? Submit it!

]]>San Francisco fans have had an unofficial no-wave policy forever. Why do they reject a cheer so many embrace?Reported by Olivia Allen-Price and Adam Grossberg. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Jessica Placzek, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson, Ethan Lindsey and Julia McEvoy. Our Vice President for News is Holly Kernan. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean5:58These Colorful Dots Are For Your Healthhttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/04/06/these-colorful-dots-will-save-your-life/
Thu, 06 Apr 2017 07:02:48 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11382204?updated=trueThey look like a work of abstract art, but these colorful dots on Bay Area streets have a big purpose.You know when you first notice something, and then you can’t ever “unnotice” it? A year ago that happened to Zak Brazen when he noticed a pattern in several local communities. He asked Bay Curious …

“Why are there colorful dots above the drainage system? And who puts them there?”

The dots are located above storm drains around the Bay Area, usually on curbs. They’re spray-painted layer upon colorful layer and look like a work of abstract art.

To Zak, they seem like they’re painted intentionally, and reminded him of the clusters of colorful thread he once saw in the back alleys of cities in Morocco.

So what’s the deal with the dots?

A Public Health War

The dots are part of a war against one of man’s greatest enemies, an enemy that kills several million people each year — the mosquito.

“Mosquitoes are naturally present in our environment here in California,” says Dr. Cora Hoover, director of Communicable Disease Control and Prevention for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Some are capable of carrying the potentially deadly West Nile virus.

West Nile first arrived in California in 2003, and spread quickly across the state. In 2007 it killed 21 people, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in certain counties.

San Francisco began working with Pestec, a pest control company, to treat more than 23,000 storm drains in the city for mosquitoes. Its eight-member San Francisco Mosquito Abatement Courier Team (SF MAC Team) completes most treatment by hand, getting around on bike or foot.

What happens when you get West Nile?

While most people who contract West Nile show no visible symptoms, one in five experience a flulike illness. About 1 percent become really sick, developing symptoms of meningitis or encephalitis. These infections affect the brain and spinal cord, and can lead to death.

What are cities doing to prevent West Nile?

Local governments treat standing water or use foggers in areas with a high density of adults. In San Francisco, the city hunts down potential breeding grounds, while contractor Pestec treats the city’s storm drains.

So far, San Francisco’s approach seems to work. Only a handful of birds and humans have contracted the virus since it started treating for West Nile in 2005. According to Hoover, no one has died.

But Why The Dots?

One Thursday, I joined Jake Munoz of the SF MAC Team on his morning route. As the first long rays of golden sunlight illuminated the pollinated spring air, Munoz led us up and down the hills near City College, pedaling past pastel homes and garbagemen on their routes.

Munoz stops his bike at every single storm drain. Using tongs, he picks up a little white plaster brick that’s laced with methoprene, and drops it through the grate. A moment later, we hear a small splash.

Rather than killing adults, methoprene works like an insect hormone, preventing normal growth. It halts egg-laying, hatching and development. The pesticide was found to have minimal effects on terrestrial animals, and is used around livestock, grain, corn, mushrooms and peanuts. Methoprene residue can be found in some cereals.

Each day, Munoz drops those little methoprene bricks into roughly 120 drains. After finishing each one, he sprays a dot on the curb above it to signify that the drain has been treated in the last 100 days. On this day, Jake uses blue spray paint. He covers the previous dot left after the last treatment less than 100 days ago.

Dot placement varies from drain to drain. Some dots look like colorful bull’s-eyes, and some are sprayed in a messy line. Others leave artful drips down the curb.

Not Just a Sign, But Art!

Before being a mosquito abatement courier, Munoz worked at a desk doing CAD modeling.

“I just got tired of sitting at a computer all day, so it’s good to be outside riding my bike,” he says.

Spending so much time on the road does have its drawbacks. He’s been hit by cars half a dozen times, and twice badly.

“I got my ankle run over one time. It looked like a seven-layer dip. It pinched the bone to the concrete. It was a nasty open wound for quite some time,” Munoz tells me.

He finds himself explaining what he’s doing to a lot of suspicious people who see him wielding a spray-paint can.

“Some people think it’s art. It kinda looks like it! I mean, you make your next dot a little over to the side so the previous one shows. … I do think about it,” says Munoz.

When he’s not on the clock, Munoz is a graffiti artist. He started his art when he was 12 years old, and recently helped paint a large mural behind the Mission Cultural Center. He uses his artistic eye to help choose the dot color schemes with his supervisor, Lorae Fernandis, who is also an artist, working in textiles and fiber art. In fact, many of the team members are visual or musical artists.

Right now, the team is starting this season with blue, but “that wasn’t our choice,” Fernandis says.

They are planning on using pink next, then orange.

So while the dots do have a practical application — to signify that drains have been treated for potentially deadly mosquitoes — they are also the work of artists.

You can visit the SF MAC website to see what color a particular dot should be.

]]>They look like a work of abstract art, but these colorful dots on Bay Area streets have a big purpose.They look like a work of abstract art, but these colorful dots on Bay Area streets have a big purpose. <br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Penny Nelson, Jessica Placzek, Julia McEvoy, Ethan Lindsey and Holly Kernan. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean6:28It’s a Mushroom Bonanza This Year! What’s the Deal?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/30/its-a-mushroom-bonanza-this-year-whats-the-deal/
Thu, 30 Mar 2017 07:02:06 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11380485?updated=trueIt’s been a wet winter across Northern California this year, and that means a bounty of mushrooms.It’s been a very wet winter across Northern California this year, and that means a bounty of mushrooms is popping up in our yards and forests. This got listener Theresa Halula wondering …

How can we find out more about mushrooms that pop up in the area? They are everywhere!

Not long after Theresa sent in this question, reporter Lesley McClurg wrapped up a story about mushrooms for KQED Science. We asked her to join us on the Bay Curious podcast to share what she learned on a recent foray — that’s forager lingo for a mushroom hunt.

Here are five things we learned about fungi …

The cap of the mushroom is only the tip of a much bigger organism that lives underground. Think of the cap as the apple on the apple tree. Underground, tendrils of a thin network called mycelium expand like cobwebs threading through the dirt.

Just because there isn’t a cap, doesn’t mean there isn’t a fungal organism. Scientists aren’t certain why some mushrooms pop, and others don’t. Even though conditions have been perfect for mushrooms this year, there are still some varieties that foragers haven’t seen. But that doesn’t mean the fungi isn’t present in the soil.

The largest known fungi system in the world is in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, where one single organism is thought to spread about 3.4 miles. Since most of the organism is underground, there isn’t too much to see — but it’s killed many evergreen trees.

There is a deadly mushroom lurking in California forests called Amanita phalloides, commonly known as the death cap. It looks a lot like the white button mushroom, so spotting them in the wild can be tricky. Until you really know your stuff, it’s a good idea to have a local expert check your mushrooms before eating them.

Get an up close view of the death caps and hear from a woman who survived eating one in this Deep Look video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl9aCH2QaQY

The mushroom business is booming. U.S. farms are producing 25 percent more mushrooms today than a decade ago. The largest mushroom farm in North America is Monterey Mushrooms, just south of Santa Cruz. They produce 120,000 pounds of mushrooms every day.

]]>It’s been a wet winter across Northern California this year, and that means a bounty of mushrooms.It’s been a wet winter across Northern California this year, and that means a bounty of mushrooms. Get ready for a lesson in fungi from KQED Science reporter Lesley McClurg. <br />
<br />
Reported by Lesley McClurg. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Jessica Placzek and Julia McEvoy. Vice President for News is Holly Kernan. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean8:40What Would It Take to Make Lake Merritt Swimmable?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/23/what-would-it-take-to-make-lake-merritt-swimmable/
Thu, 23 Mar 2017 15:00:40 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10900605?updated=trueIt would take a lot of money, work and imagination to turn Lake Merritt into a swimmable body of water.This week’s Bay Curious podcast tackles a question from the 7-year-old daughter of KQED’s Judy Campbell. Her name is Violet. She visits Lake Merritt a lot and she wants to know:

What would it take to make Lake Merritt swimmable?

Today, Lake Merritt is known as the Crown Jewel of Oakland, but it used to be called by a different name: the Lake of 1,000 Smells. To figure how to make it a swimming lake, it’d be good to know how it became un-swimmable in the first place.

Before Lake Merritt Was A Lake

Once upon a time, tides from the bay flowed freely in and out of Lake Merritt. In fact, Lake Merritt wasn’t a lake at all, but a tidal marsh, a slough. Water from the surrounding creeks flowed into the slough. During high tide, salt water filled the area. At low tide, when the water rushed back to the ocean, it left behind shimmering mudflats.

In 1852, the city of Oakland was founded and its new residents took advantage of the tidal flow.

“Originally, the population was very small. In 1850, there were about 70 permanent residents. By 1860, there were about 1,500 residents,” says Read. “As the population grew, they continued to throw sewage into the slough.”

Around this time, Dr. Samuel Merritt, the 13th mayor of Oakland, began building homes near the marsh. “He thought the real estate would be better if the slough was instead a lake,” says Linda Nack, a Camron-Stanford House docent. A weir — a kind of barrier across a river — was built in 1869 to control tidal flow and create Merritt’s Lake.

“That led to problems. If you reduce the flow of water, oxygen is reduced and the water gets more polluted,” says Read.

The next year Lake Merritt was declared the first wildlife refuge in the country, although motivations were not purely conservational.

“Dr. Merritt had a big home along the lake and he had his window shot out by a hunter,” says Nack. “His neighbor’s cow was also killed by the hunters.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3PkzIB7efk

Gradually, the duck poo began to build up and the water quality worsened.

“The lake did smell, but people tolerated it,” Nack says.

In 1897, swimming at Lake Merritt became illegal. Despite the ban, newspaper clippings from the time show a few sanctioned swim events even after it was outlawed.

Over the years, there have been various projects to improve the lake’s water quality. Human waste was diverted into sewer treatment systems and the lake was dredged a few times. However, smelly algae blooms, and trash and pollution issues plagued the lake throughout the 20th century.

By the 1960s, Lake Merritt had picked up its nickname: the Lake of a 1,000 Smells.

The Lake Merritt of Today

Lake Merritt is now a far cry from the poop swamp of yesteryear. Funds from Measure DD, passed in 2002, have been used to clean up the waterfront and restore the creek. This has increased the flow of water between Lake Merritt and the San Francisco Bay. Still, there’s a lot left to be done. The EPA has listed Lake Merritt as an impaired water body, citing low dissolved oxygen levels and trash.

“We have 62-plus storm drains that drain into Lake Merritt, and the urban runoff from 7 square miles. It’s a lot,” says James Robinson, co-director of the Lake Merritt Institute, who helps organize volunteers to pick up trash around the lake.

In drier summer months, volunteers can pull 560 pounds of trash from the lake. But during wetter months crews pull out much, much more. In December 2015, 3,220 pounds of trash were pulled from the lake, says Robinson.

Lake Merritt Institute volunteers find all kinds of debris in the lake. The oddest items? A probation anklet, a bowling ball, a gerbil in a casket and a bag full of jewelry.

Oakland officials are currently working toward the goal of no visible trash in the lake by 2022.

But it’s more than just the visible trash that is harming the lake. Some of the worst pollutants are cleaning chemicals, pesticides, leaked gas and pet feces. Birds also poop directly into the lake and volunteers have even caught people using the lake as a toilet.

Part of the problem, though, is that even when people aren’t using the lake as a bathroom, their toilets can still cause sewage to end up in the water.

“Our sewer lines go to a treatment plant, but our pipes are old. And, as systems get overloaded and overwhelmed, they can have leaks or spills underground. And that could end up in Lake Merritt,” says Kristine Shaff, from the Oakland Public Works Department.

Fecal matter is the biggest public health concern stopping swimmers in Lake Merritt. Human feces spread disease, and in order for the lake to be designated for swimming, there can’t be more than a minuscule amount of fecal matter in the water.

Since the lake is not currently open for swimmers, water quality tests are not regularly required, but are taken during special circumstances. One bacteria test, ordered after a sewage break, found that disease-causing pathogens were 20 times what is considered acceptable for swimming.

Even if testing were done more regularly, testing for feces is difficult. The lake is big and the water moves. A water sample collected next to Fairyland could be safe one minute, but five minutes later it could be bacteria-ridden.

While most of the water in the lake likely would not make you sick, there is a risk. And so far that’s a risk that the city, and most people, are not willing to take.

Into the Realm of the Theoretical

Shaff, from the Oakland Public Works Department, says there are no plans to create a swimming beach at Lake Merritt.

“To make it a swimming lake, we would have to close off all of the pipes that drain into the lake,” says Shaff. “Then we’d be tearing up all kinds of streets, so that’s not really feasible.”

The second option would be to chlorinate the lake, or at least part of it. A similar project was done at Cull Canyon in Castro Valley, where the park built a chlorinated swim lagoon.

Take A Gondola Ride on Lake Merritt

Make the video below fullscreen and use your mouse to click and drag around the 360-degree scene. (See if your browser is compatible.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QgMw3CTJ8A&feature=youtu.be

But chlorine comes with its own environmental problems. While it kills bacteria, chlorine also kills other living things in the water. Lake Merritt is first and foremost a wildlife refuge, so chlorination wouldn’t fly.

The third option — and likely the most realistic — would be to build a few acres of wetlands.

“You can pump the water through a wetland and let the wetland remove the bacteria. In fact, you could clean it down to whatever level you want,” says Dr. Alex Horne, professor emeritus of ecological engineering at UC Berkeley. Horne has helped build wetlands around the world.

“It’s easy. You get wildlife; it can look good. People would want to live there, because it looks like little lakes and islands,” he says.

A small pilot wetland was built a few years ago, but failed due to lack of funding. Horne says a high-quality wetland might cost up to $75,000 an acre. Money would also be needed to pump the water, maintain the wetland, get regular water-quality tests and employ lifeguards.

All this being said, and despite the dangers, people do still end up swimming in the lake. Boats capsize and people fall in all the time.

]]>It would take a lot of money, work and imagination to turn Lake Merritt into a swimmable body of water.It would take a lot of money, work and imagination to turn Lake Merritt into a swimmable body of water.<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Our Vice President for News is Holly Kernan. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
Follow Olivia on Twitter @oallenprice and use the #BayCurious hashtag.KQEDclean7:02What’s That Thing Off 280? The Flintstone Househttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/16/whats-that-thing-off-280-the-flintstone-house/
Thu, 16 Mar 2017 07:15:41 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11350365?updated=trueTake a tour inside this unique Peninsula home that architects find whimsical.e don’t normally profile real estate listings for Bay Curious, but this one was too fascinating to pass up. The “Flintstone House,” as Peninsula locals call it, is on the market for $3.2 million. Which means we have a rare opportunity to peek inside.

If you’ve ever driven northbound on Interstate 280 through Hillsborough, you’ve surely seen this house from the highway. There is nothing else like it in the neighborhood, which looks much like something out of “The Brady Bunch”: that is to say, sedate, one-story ranch homes circa the 1960s.

Locals named this the Flintstone House because it looks like one of the domed houses you might see in the 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

And 45 Berryessa Way does look like it could be home to Fred and Wilma.

I asked the listing agent for the house, Judy Meuschke, if this is the most eccentric house she’s ever been involved in listing — “Yes!”

Meuschke says many people are surprised when they walk inside this 2,700-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bathroom home. They expect something cavelike: dark, musty, weird. Instead, the interior is bright and airy, a meditation in cream with orange accents.

“It’s cozy,” Meuschke says. “It’s really livable. I love the house.”

She is showing me around because the current owner has moved to a smaller place, not too far from here. The woman keeps a low profile and doesn’t want her name used for this story, but she has done a lot of work on the place over the more than two decades she lived here.

The orange-and-purple paint job on the house is relatively new, as are a number of structural renovations, including a waterproof membrane, and insulation that obviates the need for air conditioning in the warmer months.

The kitchen, remodeled in the 2000s, looks to me like a biotech lab designed by Gustav Klimt. It was designed and built by Emeryville architect Eugene Tssui. His marching orders?

“The owner lives a life of art. She loves to live in art. She said to me, ‘I need a stove. I need a place for a fridge. But otherwise, anything goes,’ ” Tssui says.

Everything is round in the house, creating a biomorphic quality to the place. Even the walls are curved. You don’t hang a painting. You set it on the floor and lean it back. Or build an alcove to house it.

“Because it’s a circular plan, I felt like the vocabulary of the design needed to fit that, the grammar of the geometry,” Tssui says. “Nothing like that had ever been done before. We had to experiment ahead of time and adapt it to that space: the way that space works, the way it accommodates movement.”

Why the cables holding up the glass countertop? Earthquake safety. Tssui explains they “allow for flex, and they allow the glass countertop to float above the ground.”

Looking back at the project after about a decade, Tssui says he’s most happy about the quality of the light in the space, and its effect on the viewer: “a kind of a shimmering, soaring feeling.”

Especially in the rooms that face 280 and Crystal Springs Reservoir, there is a lot of natural light, pouring in through amoeba-shaped windows like the one above.

So who would spend $3.2 million on a party pad like this? For a number of months, there was a fair bit of interest in renting it out for $700+ a night on Airbnb. But it’s been a challenge to find the wealthy person with as big a sense of whimsy as the Flintstone House requires.

Over the years, assessor’s records show, the house has sold five times. This time around, the Flintstone House went on the market for $4.2 million in September 2015, but there have been two price reductions since then.

Meuschke acknowledges the house is not conventional.

“I think the pool of buyers is much smaller,” she says, adding she does not imagine anyone would spend this kind of money just to tear this house down.

A Spirit of Adventure in the 1970s

When you think about it, it’s kind of crazy that other home owners in the San Francisco Bay Area haven’t built more outlandish experiments like the Flintstone House.

I did check with Hillsborough’s planning division, and there aren’t any rules against wacky, per se.

That said, the owner had plans to build a second house to rent out on the property, designed by Tssui. Officials denied her proposal.

The owner wasn’t willing to fight, but Tssui still harbors misgivings.

“Planning departments promote conformity and a meek approach to design,” Tssui says. “It’s an aggressive hindrance to the freedom of human thought and action, forcing citizens to conform to personal, subjective edicts, which should be fought.”

“You know, it’s an expression of its time,” says Pierluigi Serraino, an architect in Alameda who also writes books about architectural history.

“I find it, in many respects, endearing,” he says of the Flintstone House. “I’ve always seen it from the freeway and I always thought it was a classic period piece, a bit of a folly.”

The original owners built this place in 1977. In the late 1970s, Serraino says, people were more comfortable letting their freak flag fly.

“There have always been certain strands in architecture that try to establish some relationship with the organic world,” he says.

In some respects, the Flintstone House follows a long line of fanciful architecture, with prestigious forbears including the famous Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi.

Also, the development of “shotcrete” at the turn of the last century opened a lot of doors for architecture. It’s a process in which concrete is sprayed through a hose at high velocity onto a frame of, typically, steel rebar and mesh.

“Shotcrete is a way to essentially create a sculptural fantasy, that then you cover with this layer of fluid stone,” says Serraino.

Think about that next time you’re driving past.

]]>Take a tour inside this unique Peninsula home that architects find whimsical.Take a tour inside this unique Peninsula home that architects find whimsical. Would you live there?<br />
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Reported by Rachael Myrow. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Jessica Placzek, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDcleanHow Does Rain Create More Potholes?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/09/how-does-rain-create-more-potholes/
Thu, 09 Mar 2017 08:15:42 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11350519?updated=trueThis year's rainy winter has left San Francisco Bay Area roads riddled with potholes.When you get enough rain to end a drought, there’s gonna be collateral damage.

We’re talking about our roads, where some drivers have noticed the extra potholes popping up on our highways and local streets.

“I ran over a pothole on Van Ness,” Muni transit operator Matt Smith says. “It damaged the inner boot of my car and gave me a flat front tire. The pothole was massive. It was massive! It’s no reason why that pothole should not have been fixed.”

Imagine for a moment life as a section of roadway. Passing cars are constantly pressing down on you, followed by periods of relaxation when there’s no car. All day, every day, year after year. All this repeated pressing and releasing creates tiny imperfections in the pavement that turn into cracks. When you add water into the mix, those cracks get bigger, faster.

“Whenever it rains and the rainwater accumulates on the road, tires from the road actually squeeze the water into the pavement,” Caltrans spokesman Bob Haus says. “So that repeated squeezing into the asphalt and into the concrete causes the cracking.”

Water gets through those cracks and weakens the soil under the road. That leads to even more cracking and eventually a pothole.

“There’s just a lot of traffic on Bay Area roads,” Haus says. “We all know that. We feel the congestion every day. So there’s just a lot of wear and tear on our highways.”

I’m sure a lot of you are wondering why crews aren’t out there fixing all these potholes. One thing to note: Road workers have to wait for dry conditions to make permanent fixes. So the rain not only makes more potholes, it makes it harder to fix them.

Got a question you want to see the Bay Curious team take on? Submit it!

]]>This year's rainy winter has left San Francisco Bay Area roads riddled with potholes.This year's rainy winter has left San Francisco Bay Area roads riddled with potholes. Why? And will Caltrans fix them? <br />
<br />
Reported by Penny Nelson. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho, Jessica Placzek and Julia McEvoy. Our Vice President for News is Holly Kernan. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean6:10Why Do Some Hate the Nickname ‘Frisco’?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/03/02/why-do-some-hate-the-nickname-frisco/
Thu, 02 Mar 2017 19:43:40 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11339599?updated=trueNot long after people started using it, others started hating it. They said only out-of-towners used it.FRISCO.

Just try dropping that word into conversation these days and see what kind of response you get. Chances are good the nickname will be met with a healthy dose of side-eye, a grimace or even a slap on the wrist.

Growing up, Rena relied on her friends to learn the local lingo, since her family spoke Chinese at home. One of the slang words her friends taught her was Frisco. She used it for years, until one day she slipped it in while talking to a co-worker.

“She stops me or she kind of looks at me, and says, ‘Wait, I thought people don’t like that name.’ And I said, ‘Really? I don’t think so,’ ” Rena recalls.

Suddenly, even though she’s a Bay Area native, she felt like an outsider. Ever since she’s wondered: Why all the hate?
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If you ask around, people say it’s because it’s disrespectful, truncated, ugly-sounding or icky. Basically, they don’t think the name does the city justice. But we had to find out where these arguments originally came from.

A Mysterious Birth

Author Charles Fracchia, the founder of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, tells me nobody knows exactly where the word originated, but he thinks Frisco got its start in the late 1800s — potentially from some drunkard making a contraction out of San Francisco.

He thinks one of the first written uses was maybe on some sheet music, like this example from 1897. Other people say it may have come earlier, perhaps during the Gold Rush.

Frisco’s use was probably in its heyday when the ports were strong here, around the time of World War II in the 1940s.

“It was kind of a working man’s period of time,” Fracchia says. “The port was thriving, you had lots of small manufactories here. Frisco is kind of a working man’s word.”

A Trashy Name for a Classy City?

The other thing to know: Not long after people started using it, other people started hating it. They said only out-of-towners used it. Tourists, basically.

*People agree ‘the city’ makes the most sense if you’re near the city but not actually physically in it. But that it makes no sense if you’re near another big city like, say, Hong Kong or New York.

**This is my 5-year-old son’s personal favorite because … logic.

San Francisco’s self-proclaimed emperor — the Brit Joshua Norton — supposedly banned the use of Frisco in 1872 and said whoever used it would have to pay a $25 fine. But that has not been verified.

One person we do know hated the word: Herb Caen, the revered columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. When he wrote about the city, people listened.

“Herb Caen made San Francisco into almost a village,” Fracchia says. “By the fact that his columns were very popular. There was kind of a lingua franca about them.”

Caen came along after the city had grown from a dinky West Coast outpost into a Gold Rush boomtown with saloons and debauchery, and later into a city that looked more like the East Coast and European cities it wanted to imitate.

“Don’t call it Frisco — it’s San Francisco, because it was named after St. Francis of Assisi. And because “Frisco” is a nickname that reminds the city uncomfortably of the early, brawling, boisterous days of the Barbary Coast and the cribs and sailors who were shanghaied. And because Frisco shows disrespect for a city that is now big and proper and respectable. And because only tourists call it Frisco anyway, and you don’t want to be taken for a tourist, do you?”

Fracchia says Caen’s book ruined the nickname for a lot of people. People wanted to seem proper, and cultured, so they listened to Caen and shunned it.

“That’s when I think it became controversial or contentious,” Fracchia says.

Frisco is Loved, Too

Now, many people associate the word with an earlier generation. And rightly so.

Take Joey Wilson, co-owner of a tattoo shop in the Mission called … yep, Frisco Tattoo.

“My parents always called it that,” Wilson says. “They were blue-collar workers. It was just something that was instilled in me as a kid.”

Wilson remembers Frisco as a part of his childhood.

“When I was a little kid, I think I was 12 or 13, there was a bike shop called Frisco Choppers,” Wilson says. “I’d race down there on the bus, down Valencia Street, just to buy a T-shirt that said Frisco in big, bold letters because that was the coolest.”

Today he’s in the Hells Angels — the Frisco chapter.

His wife, Lilah Wilson, says they have lots of friends who love Frisco as much as they do.

“A lot of our friends are kind of small-business owners in the city here actually, and really are owners of the name Frisco,” she says. “We had Frisco Boxing, we have 415 Clothing, we had Frisco Choppers years back. Just kind of the root and background of that name and took it far, with T-shirts and tattoos and blew up that name.”

And now Joey Wilson wants to know why Caen’s opinion should matter more than his. After all, Caen was born in Sacramento.

“So that’s the question — why does it upset you to call it Frisco?” he says. “Give us a reason. And who are you to tell us what we can and can’t do? I’m from here. I’m born and raised here, so I think I got rights to call it whatever I want.”

Working on this story one day, I grabbed a Lyft and got to talking with the driver, a guy named Lorenzo Beasley.

“I grew up on the bottom of the city, a small neighborhood called Visitacion Valley,” Beasley says. “I think more of the urban community, like blacks or Hispanics in the city, those people always grew up using that word.”

Beasley says you hear it in Hunters Point, Lakeview, the Fillmore, Potrero Hill and especially the Mission.

I asked him who doesn’t like Frisco.

“It’s like a higher class of people, I guess,” Beasley says. “People who stay in Nob Hill and stuff. They look at it like slang, so they’re not really with it. It’s definitely a bit of snob thing involved.”

For Beasley, whether you use Frisco says what neighborhood you’re from.

“Institutions or people who have power have an interest in maintaining that the way they speak is the right way to speak,” Pratt says. “Because it helps them. Because it’s coupled with this ideology that’s really widespread, that there’s a right way to speak, that there’s a way to speak that gets you ahead.”

Pratt says word choice is like a signal.

“Language as cultural capital, right?” she says. “It’s something like knowing exactly where to put your forks at the end of a meal.”

Nicknames are even more like that. Knowing which one to use and which one not to use tells people where you belong. Which brings us back to Rena, our question-asker, who suddenly felt out of place because she was called out for using Frisco.

“For someone to correct you on that, it’s kind of like, ‘Ugh, did I have it wrong this whole time?’ ” she says.

Well, we have some good news for Rena. The famous Herb Caen eventually flip-flopped on Frisco a couple of times in the 1990s. It turns out we’ve built our anti-Frisco bias on some shaky ground.

]]>Not long after people started using it, others started hating it. They said only out-of-towners used it.Not long after people started using it, others started hating it. They said only out-of-towners used it. <br />
<br />
Reported by Vinnee Tong. Produced and edited by Paul Lancour, Olivia Allen-Price, Jessica Placzek, Paul Lancour, Vinnee Tong and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
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<br />KQEDclean10:34This Lumberjack Frat Once Had the Coolest Clubhouse in S.F.https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/23/this-lumberjack-frat-once-had-the-coolest-clubhouse-in-s-f/
Thu, 23 Feb 2017 09:00:57 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11304127?updated=trueA Cupertino couple wondered where the street name "Hoo Hoo Way" came from. Turns out, it's a long story.Peter Caravalho and Sarah Caravalho Khan love to walk around their Cupertino neighborhood. It’s got quiet side streets with beautiful gardens in front of cozy family homes. Over the past year they’ve become fascinated with a one particular street near their house — Hoo Hoo Way. Which brings us to this week’s Bay Curious question:

“What is a Hoo Hoo and why is it in Cupertino?”

The Caravalhos have a theory.

“Maybe it’s a brothel?” Sarah guessed.

Others have speculated that Hoo Hoo might be a type of dessert or that it has something to do with ghosts. If you look up Hoo Hoo in Urban Dictionary, you’ll find it’s slang for … a woman’s genitalia.

But the meaning behind Hoo Hoo Way in Cupertino isn’t any of those things. Its origin stretches back to the first green rush in California, and one very wacky group.

What is a Hoo Hoo?

Before we can answer what is a Hoo Hoo, we need to know who are the Hoo-Hoo.

To find out, I head to a strip mall in Sacramento, where I find myself in an Italian restaurant surrounded by lumbermen.

Turns out, the Hoo-Hoo are a fraternity of people involved in the lumber industry. Think: the Masons or the Elks, not a college frat. (Though the drinking is perhaps comparable.)

“We accept pretty much everybody in the supply chain,” says Hoo-Hoo Kent Bond. So anybody from lumberjacks and lumber barons to architects and logging journalists can be a Hoo-Hoo.

On the night I visit, it’s new-member initiation. A dozen new members, who the frat calls “kittens,” are here to join the club in a ceremony called a concatenation.

A little before the concat (a Hoo-Hoo abbreviation), Tom Von Moos walks into the restaurant bar holding the fraternal prop — a stuffed black cat — and leading a dozen new initiates into the room.

“I’m gonna take care of my kittens!” laughed Moos while plying the new initiates with tequila and gin and tonics. “You’re lucky you didn’t get initiated in my class.”

Another Hoo-Hoo member whispers to me that the hazing isn’t what it used to be.

After the kittens were loosened up with booze, they were ushered toward a private room at the back of the restaurant for the concatenation.

I am not allowed to follow.

“It’s for members’ eyes only,” Robyn Russ Beckett tells me. Beckett is the current Snark of the Universe, which means she is the leader of about 1,600 members across the globe.

I have no idea what happened during the concatenation — and Beckett wouldn’t say much — but I did hear muffled cheers, and I suspect new members might have done something embarrassing with that stuffed black cat.

The Hoo-Hoo have been concatenating people since the group was founded after a lumber convention in 1892. Beckett did say the official outfit hasn’t changed in a while. Based on old photographs, that means the Hoo-Hoo officials are bedecked in long black robes with a black cat emblazoned on the chest. Some photos show officials wearing pointy elfin-looking hats.

“There’s such value to uniting the forest products industry and that’s what we do. It’s all about goodwill, fellowship, relationship-building, community service and networking,” says Beckett.

Hoo Hoo Facts

They have members in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and South Africa.

Their fraternal symbol is the black cat because they wanted something that was unconventional and un-superstitious. They liked the black cat’s association with bad luck.

The Hoo-Hoo have special names for their nine main officials. Many of the titles were lifted from the poems of Lewis Carroll. These include Snark, Bojum and Jabberwock. Other names are Hoo-Hoo originals like scrivenoter, arcanoper and custocatian, Sr. High Hoo-Hoo and Jr. High Hoo-Hoo. The title of gurdon comes from the name of the small town where the founders of the Hoo-Hoo first met while waiting for a train.

The Hoo-Hoo mission statement is: “Hoo-Hoo will achieve a united and progressive forest products industry through fraternal participation in its business, social and community programs so that there may result, Health, Happiness and Long Life to its members.”

They’re also about silliness. The group has described their existence as a “war on conventionality.”

For example, various clubs in the Hoo-Hoo have a tradition of giving gifts to visiting leaders. These gifts include hubcaps and toilet seats.

And as for where the word Hoo-Hoo comes from?

“One of the founders had a good friend that had a tuft of hair that he would oil and twist and it would stand up on his head, and he coined it a Hoo-Hoo,” said Beckett.

Early members used the term Hoo-Hoo for anything that was slightly out of the ordinary. An odd hat was a Hoo-Hoo, a good poker hand was a Hoo-Hoo and a chicken wearing pants would have certainly been called a Hoo-Hoo.

How Did Hoo Hoo Way Come to Cupertino?

To understand this, we need to go back to San Francisco during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, also called the 1915 World’s Fair. In those days, the World’s Fair showcased all the wonders of modernity and brought far-flung cultures and wares to those who couldn’t afford to travel.

The fair coincided with a time when the California Hoo-Hoo were riding high. They had 10,000 members, and in 1905 had reached such prominence that President Teddy Roosevelt was honorarily concatenated.

Furthermore, the redwoods were some of the best lumber anyone had ever seen and just one tree could supply enough wood to build 20 houses or one large building, such as the Church of One Tree.

Most of that lumber being cut was destined for San Francisco, which at that time should have been called the Wooden City, according to Farmer. Before the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, 90 percent of the buildings were made of lumber, the highest percentage of any U.S. metropolis. After the fire and before the groundbreaking of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 89 percent of the 28,507 new buildings had wooden frames. Mills had to work overtime to keep up with the demand.

As heavy hitters of that time and place, the Hoo-Hoo wanted to be represented at the fair.

The Hoo-Hoo commissioned Bernard Maybeck, architect of the Palace of Fine Arts, to design a magnificent house for the fair.

“The building was meant to promote the use of Western lumber and to provide hospitality for visiting lumbermen, and encourage social interaction so they could develop professional relationships,” says Ackley.

Maybeck used huge tree trunks as columns outside the building. Rough bark still clung to the wood and was meant to remind visitors of a forest. Inside, an assortment of rooms showcased the uses of all sorts of Pacific coast woods.

The building had amenities, including a mail clerk, a stenographer, a telephone (new at the time), a ladies’ retiring room and a room for men to sit and read the paper. There was also a great hall for celebrations and rituals.

The House of Hoo-Hoo held a concatenation on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month of the fair — all an homage to the nine lives of the cat.

According to Ackley, the opening was attended by a cat named Panama, the “official exposition cat,” which undoubtedly was a good omen for the Hoo-Hoo.

The House of Hoo-Hoo was mostly closed to the public, though on the few days it was open, about 25,000 visitors toured the place.

When the fair ended, many of the buildings were torn down, but not the House of Hoo-Hoo. It was bought by a rich man unaffiliated with the Hoo-Hoo organization. He had the building disassembled, put on a barge and shipped down to Monta Vista, or modern-day Cupertino; close to our question-askers, the Caravalhos, and a road that would eventually become Hoo-Hoo Way.

The building was supposed to be used as a community center but ended up as a kind of roadhouse, with lots of dancing and drinking (before prohibition was enacted). The establishment was considered unsavory at the time. Despite protests by the Hoo-Hoo, the new owner kept the name and symbols of the Hoo-Hoo. A large black cat still hung over the doorway and was used in newspaper ads.

The Hoo-Hoo didn’t appreciate the appropriation of their name and traditions, but it would soon become a moot point. On Aug. 15, 1926, the House of Hoo-Hoo caught fire and burned to the ground.

“It was said to be defective wiring, but we will never know,” says Ackley.

By that point the hill that the House of Hoo-Hoo sat atop was being called Hoo-Hoo Hill, and the street nearby was — you guessed it — Hoo-Hoo Way.

Editor’s Note: Hoo Hoo Way has been replaced by a street sign that reads Carmen Road.

]]>A Cupertino couple wondered where the street name "Hoo Hoo Way" came from. Turns out, it's a long story.A Cupertino couple wondered where the street name "Hoo Hoo Way" came from. Turns out, it's a long story.<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Bay Curious is Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Julia McEvoy, Suzie Racho, Holly Kernan, David Weir and Ethan Lindsey. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller. <br />
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Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
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Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean10:06Why is Marin County So White?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/16/why-is-marin-county-so-white/
Thu, 16 Feb 2017 18:15:06 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11307601?updated=trueA look at the pivotal moments in Marin history that contributed to its demographics today.Take a trip through some pivotal moments in Marin history that contributed to its demographics today. Bay Curious is a podcast from KQED that answers your questions about the Bay Area.

ix years ago, Henry Ma moved to the Bay Area with his wife from New York City. They settled in San Rafael — the perfect location between both of their jobs.

When they had two girls, he started to notice something about where he lived in Marin County.

“Our daughter was the only Asian in the school of 72 kids,” Ma said.

It made him wonder: “The Bay Area is one of the most diverse places in the country. Within the Bay Area, why is Marin County the least diverse?”

Looking at the Numbers

The data back up Henry’s experience. According to the most recent U.S. Census data, a huge majority — as in 72 percent — of people who live in Marin County identify their race as white. And that doesn’t include Hispanic/Latino folks who also identify as white.

For comparison, Alameda County is 33 percent white and 29 percent Asian. Asians make up just 6 percent of people in Marin County.

But look back at Marin County’s history and you’ll find that it wasn’t always that way. In fact, its demographic history is not too far off from the rest of the Bay Area’s. Archives at the Anne T. Kent California Room show that what is now Marin County was once almost completely occupied by tribes of the Coast Miwok Indians.

In 1817, the Spanish established Mission San Rafael Arcangel in what is now the city of San Rafael. Between 1834-1846, significant portions of Marin were owned by people of Spanish and Mexican descent.

Finally, there was a huge influx of African-Americans who came to work in the shipyards during World War II, though it wasn’t enough to change the demographics significantly.

So what explains the county’s demographics as they look today?

A common guess is that it has to do with the lack of public transportation options in Marin County. BART, for example, doesn’t reach the North Bay.

Low-income residents who live in San Rafael — home to the highest percentage of Latinos in Marin County — have reported that they live there because of the public transportation options. San Rafael has the most used transit service in the county, and some residents say that better transit throughout the county would allow them to move.

But there’s a lot more to it.

How Conservation Efforts Took Up Space

There were a few huge moments in Marin County history that played a role in changing the demographics of the county.

The railway was an 8-mile long, open-air ride up the side of Mount Tamalpais. At the peak of the mountain was a spectacular view of the San Francisco Bay Area. There was a resort, a grand restaurant, bar and tavern where visitors could stay the night. People from the East Coast and even Europe would travel to Marin County to ride the railway in long dresses and three-piece suits.

But the main purpose of the railway was to showcase the natural beauty of Marin so that people would want to preserve it.

“Seeing those things inspired people to want to create the national parks they have now,” said Fred Runner, a historian who wrote a book on the historic railway. “Their whole thing was to show off the lovely scenery and to try to promote wilderness conservation. Everybody who worked on the railroad believed in that.”

The railway was just the start of fruitful conservation efforts in Marin County — efforts that today leave around 80 percent of the county undeveloped because of long-standing commitments to land preservation.

Marin County has the most land set aside for preservation of any Bay Area county.

“One of the battles that raged early on was to try and stop building homes,” said Runner. “There were a number of legal battles around that — just by the skin of their teeth — being able to stop housing developments and create preserved wilderness.”

A combination of limited land, zoning laws and Marin County’s proximity to San Francisco created a scenario in which the demand for housing far outweighed supply.

The homes that were built were very expensive. Who doesn’t want to live next to a giant park, right? Today, the median household income is nearly $94,000 a year, according to census data. This, over time, began to limit who was able to move into Marin County.

Fights Over Affordable Housing

Marin’s skewed demographics caught the attention of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2011, and it conducted an audit on the county. It sought to answer: Was the county working hard enough to include people of color in its housing plans?

“HUD identified Marin as a county of interest because Marin County is primarily white,” said Jessica Tankersley Sparks, who co-wrote a report called the “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” for Marin County. “In comparison to surrounding counties, those demographics are strikingly different from the demographics in Marin County.”

The county’s demographics looked a lot like Westchester County in New York, which became the site of a famous fair housing lawsuit related to patterns of residential segregation. Officials suspected the same thing might be happening in Marin County.

“When you talk about Marin County, you really have to look at the history of segregation,” said Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California and another co-author of the audit. “In some ways it’s not atypical. It just played out in slightly different ways.”

The audit found that the county had failed to comply with fair housing and civil rights laws, agreeing that it had built only a fraction of the low-income housing mandated by the Association of Bay Area Governments.

By failing to comply with these laws, the audit found, Marin County had failed to take active steps to welcome the people those laws sought to protect — including people of color.

“What we saw by and large was that the effective opposition to affordable housing had a corollary effect of creating impediments to housing choice to people in protected classes,” said Sparks. “[That includes] people of color, people with children, people with disabilities.”

Marin County isn’t the only place with some history of opposition to affordable housing. But other factors — namely, all of the land set aside for conservation — made it that much more difficult to find suitable places to build affordable housing.

“Marin is very wealthy and the houses here cost quite a bit,” said Peattie. “It’s hard to own property here [and it’s] easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s just a question about money, it’s not about race at all.’ But it’s not that simple.”

The Role of Reputation

While the lack of affordable housing answers why low-income people of color might not move into Marin, why aren’t high-income people of color moving there?

A report from the Center for Responsible Lending found that people of color in California who can afford to move into expensive neighborhoods typically choose not to. Instead, they mostly still choose to live in low-income, majority-minority neighborhoods.

People are quick to turn to a “self-segregation” argument, says professor Maria Krysan, head of the sociology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She thinks that argument doesn’t hold up.

“The desire to avoid those settings is not driven by an affinity to live with their own kind, but a desire to avoid negative treatment by their neighbors,” says Krysan. “Certainly a perception or reputation of a community, and its openness to people of your own race and ethnicity, is something that comes up more often for African-Americans and Latinos than it does for whites.”

This anticipation for hostility, she says, has historical precedence.

“[It] comes from a history of discrimination and discriminatory treatment. It comes from a long history of that for African-Americans moving into white neighborhoods,” she said. “People trying to move into these communities were met with a great deal of hostility and violence, and I think that the memory of that and the repeat performance of that over time, creates a dynamic of anticipated discrimination that can make it an unpleasant prospect to move into an all-white neighborhood — especially if that neighborhood has been making the news or has reinforced that reputation of not being welcoming.”

“It’s hard to own property here, and it’s easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s just a question about money, it’s not about race at all.’ But it’s not that simple.”Caroline Peattie, Executive Director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California

Fighting Perception

I met a guy named John Young, who was born and raised in Marin City. He’s African-American and he says he knows people of color who have floated around this idea of Marin as a place just for white people.

“That’s why a lot of people of color stay away,” he said.

But Young hoped to change that. He became executive director of a group called Marin Grassroots, which was all about empowering people of color in local politics in Marin — a task he says was a challenging one.

“There was no baseline for social justice anywhere there,” he said. “Even the language of social justice, social equity … there was none of that present in Marin.”

Young admits that he had his fair share of encounters with cops because of “driving while black.” But he also says he loves Marin.

“We didn’t really have whites on this side, blacks on [that side],” he said. “I didn’t walk outside saying, ‘Oh, this is a racist place where I live at.'”

John lives in Vallejo now because he couldn’t afford to stay. But if he could move back, he would. He says there are people in Marin County who recognize the lack of diversity, and who are working to change it — including white people.

A Setting That ‘Represents Society’

Marin has made some changes that some say are steps in the right direction. County supervisors are trying to get landlords to rent to more Section 8 voucher holders, for example. They’ve also taken some measures to begin making up for their shortage of affordable housing.

When I asked Henry Ma why he asked us this question, it was personal — especially when it came to his kids.

“We don’t want them to think that they are such a rare occurrence — that being Asian is such a rare situation,” said Ma. “We don’t know how it’s going to shape their view.”

And that’s important to him.

“We just think that when they get out to society that the representation is not going to be like this,” he said. “We want to expose them to a setting that represents society. That’s all that we want to ask for.”

]]>A look at the pivotal moments in Marin history that contributed to its demographics today.Marin County is the whitest county in the Bay Area -- but why? Reporter Ericka Cruz-Guevarra takes us through some pivotal moments in Marin history that contributed to its demographics today. <br />
<br />
Reported by Ericka Cruz-Guevarra. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean10:17How Many Are Being Displaced by Gentrification in Oakland?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/09/how-many-are-being-displaced-by-gentrification-in-oakland/
Thu, 09 Feb 2017 14:00:58 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11307279?updated=truePutting a number on displacement is a tall order, but we do have an idea about who is leaving Oakland.here are a couple of go-to topics of conversation when you meet someone new in the Bay Area — the weather and the crushing cost of housing. The first is a bit befuddling for a place that sees so little weather variation from day to day, and even month to month. But housing on the other hand … ooof. There is so much to say.

Rents are up. Housing prices are up. We’re all paying more and it seems no one is immune.

The place where prices are rising the fastest isn’t San Francisco anymore — it’s Oakland. Between July 2011 and July 2016 the median price of a home nearly doubled to $626,000, according to real estate website Trulia. And median rents went up by $1,100 during that time.

Seeing these market forces at play, Bay Curious listener Elena Foshay wonders: “How many people are actually being displaced by gentrification in Oakland?”

Driving at a Number

Ok, first, a disclaimer: It’s nearly impossible to get an exact number of how many people are being displaced because we can’t know why everyone decides, or is forced, to move. It’s not like there is an exit survey that people fill out when they drive their U-Haul across the Oakland border.

Assuming that all things are fair and equal (I know, I know, use your imagination for a moment), we would expect people of different income groups to move out of a city at a rate proportional to their population in the city. In Oakland, 14.6 percent of households make less than $30,000, so we’d expect about 14.6 percent of people in that income level to leave the city.

Between 2010 and 2014, Trulia found 28 percent of those leaving Oakland made less than $30,000. That’s nearly double what we would expect, and confirms that low-income people are leaving the city at disproportionately high rates. At the other end of the spectrum, high-income earners making $150,000 or more are leaving at a rate about 30 percent lower than expected. All this points to cost being a major driver of who has to leave and who gets to stay.

How many people are we talking about?

During that five-year span between 2010 and 2014, 104,544 people left Oakland. (Sidenote: 108,649 people moved in, so overall the city grew.) So, we’ll speculate that during the five-year span, at least 14,008 left Oakland for economic reasons.

That number is likely on the low end of reality because it doesn’t factor in households making more than $30,000. There are certainly many people making middle or high incomes who can’t afford a comfortable life in Oakland, especially with a family.

We can also tell from census data that people of color are leaving Oakland in record numbers. Since 2000, the city has lost 30 percent of its black population — a notable trend for a city that was once 47 percent black, and home to the Black Panther Party.

Where is Everybody Going?

According to census data, the majority of residents being pushed out of Oakland are staying in California.

KQED reporters Devin Katayama and Sandhya Dirks spent a year reporting on the outmigration of low-income residents and people of color from Oakland, San Francisco and Richmond to the surrounding suburbs.

“As we were reporting on Oakland we kept hearing, ‘Oh, they’re going out to Antioch,’ ‘He moved to Antioch,’ ‘She moved to Antioch,’ ” says Dirks. “So, we went to Antioch.”

The traditionally white working-class community about 45 miles east of San Francisco is undergoing a change that is often overlooked in reports about gentrification in the Bay Area.

Listen to the first episode of their project, American Suburb, which is Season 1 of KQED’s Q’ed Up podcast. Their work answers many more questions about the impacts of gentrification on Oakland and beyond.

]]>Putting a number on displacement is a tall order, but we do have an idea about who is leaving Oakland.Putting a number on displacement is a tall order, but we do have an idea about who is leaving Oakland.<br />
<br />
Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean10:11Why Does San Jose Have So Many Urban Islands?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/02/whats-it-like-to-live-in-an-urban-island/
Thu, 02 Feb 2017 14:22:13 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10953849?updated=trueFor the residents of one unincorporated urban island, there's a uniqueness to their community they want to preserve.Bay Curious listener Kristin Seitz was looking at a map of San Jose when she noticed an awful lot of holes. The city’s territory isn’t one undivided shape, but rather resembles a piece of Swiss cheese.

Seitz wondered: Why are there so many unincorporated “urban islands” in the San Jose area?

To find out, first we went to Jane Power’s house. When you stand on her front porch, you’d think you’re in San Jose. Walk 10 minutes south and you can be at San Jose City College. Drive a few miles east and you can be in the city’s downtown.

But when Power and her neighbors cast their ballots, they don’t get to vote for San Jose representatives or ballot measures.

And when they call for police, it’s not the San Jose police that will come.

That’s because despite being completely surrounded by San Jose on all sides, Power doesn’t live in San Jose.

She lives in the unincorporated island of Burbank.

“I like being special and Burbank is special,” says Power, who chairs the Burbank Community Association, a collection of residents who gather to talk about community issues. “There’s a feeling of neighborhood. That’s something that a lot of places in the Bay Area just don’t have.”

All around San Jose you’ll find islands just like Burbank — small communities that are completely surrounded or bordered by San Jose or Campbell, but aren’t actually part of any city at all.

While some of these islands are open land, many look just like any other neighborhood. Nearly 5,000 people live in Central Burbank alone, and they fall under the jurisdiction of Santa Clara County.

But what is it that Burbank doesn’t have that an incorporated city might?

For one, there are no city taxes. There’s no city government or business tax, and if there’s an issue that might sound like a job for city government, residents call their county supervisor. When someone in Burbank calls 911, the county sheriff responds — not San Jose police.

Burbank residents say they feel removed from the high-rises and tech industries changing San Jose. The small bungalows and Craftsman-style homes built for cannery workers and blue-collar folks leave them with a desire to preserve a way of life that predates the modern definition of Silicon Valley.

“It’s almost like the ’50s,” says Henni Kaufman, treasurer of the Burbank Community Association. “I do a lot of yard work and I’m out there and the kids come and talk to me. They ride their bicycles up and down the sidewalk, and neighbors really watch out for one another.”

The former San Jose resident had no idea that she was moving into an unincorporated community when she bought her home in 1984. Now, the difference is clear.

‘I have the opportunity to do something to improve the quality of the community because it’s manageable.’Ken Colson, Director of the Burbank Sanitary District

The community feel translates on a political level, too, says Ken Colson, who sits on the board of directors of the Burbank Sanitary District.

“I have the opportunity to do something to improve the quality of the community [because] it’s manageable,” says Colson. “We can get on the phone and call our county supervisor and he has a staff that responds. The city? [That] would be tough.”

A Historic Artifact

Jane Power’s home was one of the first houses built in her subdivision in 1905. The bedrooms have no closets and the street in front of her home is so narrow that you can park on only one side of it. Perhaps it was the perfect width for a horse-drawn carriage, but not enough for the cars of today.

Areas like Burbank developed long before the neighborhoods around them did, says Bill Shoe, the principal planner of the Santa Clara Planning Department. In fact, developers began building the first residential tracts in Burbank as early as 1904. Shoe says these islands are a direct result of the way San Jose expanded.

“They’re like a window into the history of urbanization in the county,” he says.

After World War II, the suburbanization of San Jose mirrored national trends. Returning veterans, the advent of the car and expanding freeways incentivized the city to expand its borders as a way to grow its tax base.

But this growth wasn’t always uniform or rational. Because some land was easier to annex than others, the city would skip over pockets of land to continue its outward growth.

“It resulted in an irregular and dysfunctional set of boundaries,” Shoe says.

The pockets of land that got skipped over were often neighborhoods with homes built by those who worked at the canneries or in agriculture before the war — long before anyone thought about suburbanization.

“It’s a reflection of the history,” says Shoe. “Of the time when cars were not as predominant, and when people still had horses and carriages.”

At their peak, there were likely hundreds of unincorporated islands in Santa Clara County, but the county did not keep documentation of these islands until they launched an island annexation program in the 1990s.

In 2005, the county still had 180 unincorporated areas. Eighty-nine percent of them were smaller than 150 acres. That number has been whittled down to 87 islands that remain today. The largest and most well-known include Burbank, Alum Rock and Cambrian.

Plans to Annex

While there aren’t as many unincorporated urban islands as there once were, the county plans to eventually dissolve them all into neighboring and surrounding cities, says Neelima Palacherla, executive officer of the Local Agency Formation Commission of Santa Clara County.

Palacherla says the county simply wasn’t built to provide services to unincorporated islands. Sometimes, she says, this system gets confusing for both the county and unincorporated residents.

“There could be a lot of confusion for residents who live in an island regarding who provides services to them in an emergency. Who do they call?” says Palacherla.

New residents, like Henni Kaufman, sometimes have no idea they moved into an unincorporated area. Some don’t find out until an emergency or an election.

Then there are things like sidewalks. In San Jose, all major developments must have sidewalks. In unincorporated islands, they’re simply not required — though sometimes residents put them in themselves.

“By annexing into a city, they know that they’re receiving or will be receiving services from an agency — which is the city — that was created and geared to provide services to their neighborhood and their area, as opposed to the county, which has to provide these services in a very scattered manner,” Palacherla says.

But don’t expect mass annexation any time soon. There are plenty of obstacles.

“Because of … just how lengthy [annexation] could be, and how expensive and cumbersome, many of the city’s residents and county are not interested in going through this process,” Palacherla says.

Annexation is perceived to be so cumbersome, she says, that the county is working on creating a more streamlined process. The traditional process starts with the proposed annexation, then moves onto zoning designations, community meetings for larger areas, and planning commission and city council hearings. Sometimes, in between all of this, there are protests from residents. In other cases, cities simply don’t see any financial benefit to annexation.

The most contentious annexation battle in recent history happened in 2011, when San Jose and the neighboring city of Campbell fought to win over the hearts of 1,000 residents in a 103-acre island known as Cambrian 36.

Cambrian residents had a strong unincorporated neighborhood association that protested annexation at public hearings in San Jose. The city had its eye on the promise of new tax revenue to be generated by the island’s annexation. The deal ended in a $1 million settlement between the two cities. Campbell got the island, and San Jose got the money.

San Jose has stepped up its annexation proceedings over the last 10 years, taking over dozens of islands as part of an annexation collaboration between the county and San Jose.

“There might be a time in the near future when it becomes a focus of the cities, but it’s hard to predict,” says Shoe.

Burbank residents who want to hold onto their unincorporated status are nervous.

“We in the Burbank area are challenged,” Colson says. “We’re brainstorming how we can keep some semblance of an identity here and keep this kind of character.”

Residents like Jane Power say it’s about saving the community from the redevelopment that has changed San Jose.

“We want to keep the unique housing,” she says. “We don’t want to have it bulldozed down and have another high-rise take up three or four lots where we have single-family housing.”

For now, Shoe says it’s unclear when full annexation of the remaining pockets will happen.

Until then, Burbank will remain exactly the way Jane Power likes it: special.

The outline of San Jose reveals several of the islands in Santa Clara County.

]]>For the residents of one unincorporated urban island, there's a uniqueness to their community they want to preserve.Bay Curious listener Kristin Seitz was looking at a map of San Jose when she noticed an awful lot of holes. The city's territory isn't one undivided shape, but rather resembles a piece of Swiss cheese. Seitz wondered: Why are there so many unincorporated "urban islands" in the San Jose area?<br />
<br />
Reported by Ericka Cruz-Guevarra. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean5:14Is Air Quality in the Bay Area Getting Worse?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/26/is-air-quality-in-the-bay-area-getting-worse/
Thu, 26 Jan 2017 19:18:37 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11276904?updated=trueThere were 27 Spare the Air alerts last summer. But our air quality is actually looking up.Jenny Wread is one of several KQED listeners who wanted to know more about air quality in the Bay Area.

Last summer, she was commuting regularly between Marin and the East Bay and noticed a lot of smog.

So she contacted Bay Curious, and we met up for a stroll in Berkeley recently.

“Look at the trees,” she said. “They don’t look green. It’s like looking through a dirty window. Everything’s gray!”

Wread’s hypothesis: “My guess is that there’s just a lot more cars on the road and the air quality has gotten worse.”

How do we measure air quality?

We took Wread’s concern to the experts. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District is the agency that monitors our air. Eric Stevenson oversees the agency’s monitoring network of 35 stations. He says there’s at least one station in each Bay Area county.

The measuring posts are in city centers and rural spots, to get a range of data. Stevenson says there are also monitoring stations near industrial pollution sources like refineries, power plants and ports.

The stations can look like mini trailers by the side of the road or probes on the tops of buildings. They’re made to be pretty unobtrusive.

The two most harmful to human health are ozone and particulate matter called PM2.5 (which includes all particulate matter 2.5 micrometers or smaller).

Ozone comes from cars, power plants and refineries, when emissions react with sunlight. It’s a bigger problem in the summer.

Particulate matter comes from emissions and from burning things. It could originate from industrial sources like a power plant or even a cozy fire in your fireplace. Particulate matter is more of a wintertime concern.

When we talk about air quality, we’re talking about concentrations of these pollutants.

How dirty is it?

It turns out that the air in the Bay Area is among the cleanest in the nation for a metropolitan area of its size.

Stevenson at BAAQMD says air pollution in the Bay Area has been decreasing over time, and is way down since the 1960s.

Stevenson said the biggest reason for the improvement is stricter regulations on emissions from cars and industrial sources.

“The California Air Resources Board has authority over cars and they set very strict limits,” he said. “Cars now are significantly cleaner than the ’70s and ’80s. That has really helped improve air quality.”

The Clean Air Act allows California to set stricter standards than the federal government on emissions from cars. Good to note: The state needs a waiver from the EPA to set the stricter threshold, and different administrations have differed on whether to allow it. Some are worried that it may be halted under a Trump administration.

What about Spare the Air alerts?

Wread was convinced the air was dirtier in the Bay Area because she was hearing more Spare the Air alerts. The air district issues alerts when it appears that pollution levels will exceed national standards for safety. The idea is to get people to drive less and not put more pollution into the air by, say, burning stuff. KQED and other stations broadcast these alerts as a public service.

Does that necessarily mean that air quality is worse? It turns out, no. And here’s why.

The Air Quality Management District says the actual reason there are more Spare the Air alerts now is because in 2015 the Environmental Protection Agency tightened the standards for ozone levels from 75 parts per billion to 70 parts per billion. The air district had to call more alerts to meet the new standard.

So while Wread’s logic was sound, the data she was using had shifted.

Air inequality

While air quality has improved overall in the Bay Area, not everyone is breathing the same air.

West Oakland and Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco are two hot spots that are more polluted because they’re near major sources of pollution like ports and freeways.

John Balmes of UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley says neighborhoods that are more polluted often have some things in common.

“They tend to be in communities of color with lower socioeconomic status where there’s lots of stuff going on, typically more freeways, power plants, refineries and other kinds of transportation corridors,” he says.

Balmes says these communities are at greater risk for health problems like asthma and heart conditions.

Despite this inequity, there is a silver lining. All over the Bay Area, air quality is getting better. Balmes says that partly we can thank stricter rules on heavy-duty diesel trucks that often operate near industrial sources.

“There’s still a disparity,” he says, “But everywhere has gotten better.”

What about L.A.?

Whether it’s a baseball game or good food or average ozone levels, Bay Area locals love to beat L.A.

So, how does our air compare? Well, L.A. is, literally, the worst.

But, bragging rights might not really be earned here, because Stevenson says a lot of it has to do with factors beyond our control.

“The L.A. basin is kind of a bowl,” he says. “And it’s hot and so that forms ozone. We can’t blame it all on them. They would have these problems even if people didn’t live there.”

The Bay Area, on the other hand, is pretty fortunate when it comes to how topography affects air quality. Strong winds called prevailing westerlies push dirty air east all the way to the Sierra. Many argue that pollution from the Bay Area (and maybe Asia) contributes to poor air quality in the inland San Joaquin Valley.

So, for now Bay Area residents, you can breathe a sigh of relief and know it was a relatively clean one.

]]>There were 27 Spare the Air alerts last summer. But our air quality is actually looking up.Listener Jenny Wread has noticed the Bay Area's smog on her commute. And she's hearing more Spare the Air alerts. How is the air quality doing in the Bay Area as the population grows? <br />
<br />
Reported by Matt Beagle. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean7:47For Whom The Foghorn Blowshttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/20/for-whom-the-foghorn-blows-fixed/
Fri, 20 Jan 2017 09:08:24 +0000https://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11278164?updated=trueOur listeners asked a boatload of questions about foghorns. We've got answers.If you live in the Bay Area, a foggy day can be a good excuse for some guilt-free time indoors. If you live near the water, days like that bring something else: foghorns.

That’s the topic of a question we got at Bay Curious.

San Francisco residents Andy MacKinnon and Jen Liu live in the Sunset District near Ocean Beach.

From their apartment, MacKinnon says, “We can see the fog rolling in off the ocean and creeping up the street until our house is completely engulfed by fog. And shortly after that happens, we start hearing foghorns.”

Sometimes they can hear three foghorns all at once, and it’s hard to figure out where they’re coming from.

MacKinnon and Liu have a boatload of questions about the sounds that help vessels navigate safely through the water. They want to know:

Where are these foghorns?

How many of them are there?

Why do we still use them despite technologies like radar and GPS?

Who or what turns them on?

Let’s find some answers.

Where are the foghorns and how many are there?

We start on Yerba Buena Island, right in the middle of the Bay Bridge, with U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer John Sherwood of the Aids to Navigation Team San Francisco. One aspect of his job is maintaining foghorns, lights and other signals that are essentially the road signs of the water.

Sherwood shows me a map listing these aids to navigation — things like buoys, signs and foghorns. Sherwood counts 11 foghorns that the Coast Guard operates in the bay, and roughly 20 more operated by other entities.

“We have horns located at Point Bonita, Yerba Buena Island, Alcatraz Island, Angel Island,” he says. They’re not only on islands, but also at bridges and lighthouses.

Each foghorn has a distinct sound and plays at a different interval, which is intentional. Sherwood says that in low visibility it’s possible to figure out which point of land is closest if you learn the sounds of each foghorn well enough.

Sherwood also shows me around a Coast Guard parking lot. It looks like an island of misfit toys, with several 20-foot-long metal buoys on their sides.

Sherwood calls this area a “buoy depot.” Here, the Coast Guard repairs buoys to put them back out in the water. The buoys are important instruments in the orchestra of the sea. Foghorns make music, but buoys do as well.

Sherwood says some buoys have huge bells that sound off when swayed by rough waves. Others have gongs — made of stacks of metal plates. And there are also whistles.

Sherwood says that if we think we’ve never heard these before, it’s more likely that we don’t recognize them or know to listen for them. Some of these noises could be making their way to MacKinnon’s and Liu’s apartment, too.

Why do we still use foghorns if we now have sophisticated navigational systems?

When the bridge opened in the 1930s, he says, there were a lot of complaints from people who lived in San Francisco because they were being kept awake by the foghorns.

“They run 149 decibels,” Territo says. That’s nine decibels louder than the point at which a person starts to feel pain.

So, Territo says they redirected the foghorns more toward the center of the bay.

“And then the Alcatraz prisoners were complaining that it was interrupting their sleep,” he says. Those complaints were largely ignored, however, and the foghorns stayed that way.

I meet Territo with the goal of seeing the Golden Gate Bridge foghorns. They’re frequent favorites with some nautical experts because of their design: The horns run on compressed air, while more modern ones are electric. I also want to get a sense of just how loud these are, and find out who turns them on.

To get to two out of the five foghorns on the bridge, we have to go down 240 feet through a secret door that, if you’ve ever walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, you have passed and likely not noticed. Then we squeeze into a phone booth-size elevator inside the South Tower of the bridge.

When we scramble out onto a concrete platform, we’re just 40 feet above the bay waves.

“As you can see, we’re on the South Tower Pier,” Territo says.

He points to two orange tanks on the concrete platform. They are each about the size of a four-door car.

“We had an original air tank for the foghorns that was put in here in 1937 and it rusted out about a year ago,” he says. They’ve replaced both.

The foghorns work by pushing compressed air through the noisemakers. This air is pumped to the tanks from a building right by the bridge toll booths.

At one end of the platform where we stand, there, in all of its international-orange glory, is a 4-foot-long foghorn.

We shove neon earplugs into our ears. Territo radios engineers to blow the foghorns. The way they operate something very old is through something very new: a touch-screen monitor. While it’s not foggy in the slightest, they do it. For me. For you. For Andy MacKinnon and Jen Liu.

Territo summarizes the feeling best.

“If you’re standing next to it,” he says, “it vibrates your bones.”

]]>Our listeners asked a boatload of questions about foghorns. We've got answers.If you live in the Bay Area, a foggy day can be a good excuse for some guilt-free time indoors. If you live near the water, days like that bring something else: foghorns.<br />
<br />
Reported by Laura Klivans. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Suzie Racho, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean11:26Why Aren’t There Any Strip Clubs in the East Bay?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/12/why-arent-there-any-strip-clubs-in-the-east-bay/
Thu, 12 Jan 2017 16:00:50 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11033429?updated=trueIn the 1960s, San Francisco was in the midst of a sexual revolution. Oakland wanted none of it. In the 1960s, San Francisco was in the midst of a sexual revolution. Officials across the bay in Oakland wanted none of it. Bay Curious is a new podcast from KQED that answers your questions about the Bay Area.

Listener Alicia Gallo was out with friends one night, and they couldn’t find any strip clubs to go to in the East Bay. She got to thinking, San Francisco has plenty of them. She remembers going to one in S.F. for a friend’s birthday party back in college. Stumped, she asked Bay Curious, “Why aren’t there any strip clubs in the East Bay?”

Are There Really None?

Like Alicia Gallo, I couldn’t find any strip clubs in the East Bay. But I did find strippers. After asking around a bit, I met an Oakland club promoter named Trina McQueen.

“When I came to Oakland there was no strip clubs,” McQueen says. “So my girlfriend and I and all of her friends brought it to Oakland. That was in 1991. And it shot off the roof.”

McQueen’s dancers work at Club BNB, an LGBT bar in downtown Oakland. They dance and strip — but not all the way.

There’s a reason her dancers don’t disrobe beyond their pasties and G-strings. It’s against the law for dancers to go nude in Oakland, or anywhere in Alameda County.

“My show is not a nude show,” McQueen says.

‘No Breasts or Private Parts’

According to Chapter 9.28 of the Oakland Municipal Code, it’s a misdemeanor for women to expose their breasts “while participating in any live act, demonstration, or exhibition in any public place.” Even simulating that nipple with a pasty is questionable.

Every female is guilty of a misdemeanor who, while participating in any live act, demonstration, or exhibition in any public place, place open to the public, or place open to public view, or while serving food or drink or both to any customer:

A. Exposes any portion of either breast below a straight line so drawn that both nipples and all portions of both breasts which have a different pigmentation than that of the main portion of the breasts are below such straight line; or

B. Employs any device or covering which is intended to simulate such portions of the breast below such line; or

C. Wears any type of clothing so that any portion of such part of the breast may be observed.

The Oakland City Council passed this ordinance in 1970. But why? For the answer, you need to cross the Bay to San Francisco, where commercial sex was booming, says Josh Sides, the Whitsett Professor of California History at Cal State Northridge.

Carol Doda Goes Topless For the First Time

In the 1960s, people watched dancers perform in pasties and swimsuits at go-go bars on Broadway in North Beach.

On June 19, 1964, at the Condor Club, a cocktail waitress named Carol Doda tossed aside her pasties and did The Swim dance in a topless monokini.

“They were lined up around the corner. It’s like they had never seen bare breasts before in their lives,” she said. Baring her nipples was a big deal, she added — “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

Doda’s dance sparked a sexual revolution of its own. There was an explosion of adult bookstores, erotic massage parlors and porn theaters, particularly in the North Beach and Tenderloin neighborhoods.

Sides says San Francisco went from having no topless clubs in 1964 to having about 40 within a year.

“San Francisco became the sort of example that every city wanted to avoid,” he said.

The Smut Capital of America

In 1969, local and state lawmakers started to crack down on obscenity and indecency. Dianne Feinstein was running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that year, and she pointed to “the growth of obscenity” as one of the things ruining the city.

In September 1969, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the Quimby-Walsh Act. The law allowed cities and counties to regulate how waiters, waitresses and entertainers dress in bars and restaurants.

On Jan. 22, 1970, Oakland passed an ordinance prohibiting “exposure of portions of the human body in specified places.” City officials had been waiting for Reagan to sign the Quimby-Walsh Act so they could stifle the topless — and emerging bottomless — craze.

To this day, that ordinance is what keeps strip clubs out of Oakland.

“We get quite a bit of interest of individuals wanting to start strip clubs in Oakland, but unfortunately the city’s policies and regulations don’t allow that at this time,” says Juno Thomas, Small Business Assistance Center coordinator for the Oakland Economic and Workforce Development Department.

We Don’t Want You Here!

The ban over all of Alameda County means there’s also no legal strip clubs in cities like Hayward, Emeryville or Berkeley.

Other cities in the East Bay use zoning rules to discourage strip clubs and restrict where they try to open. That’s how it’s done in Contra Costa County — home to the cities of Richmond and Walnut Creek. In fact, zoning is the most common way municipalities deal with strip clubs.

As for McQueen, she’s hoping Oakland will change its rules to match San Francisco.

“I don’t feel like my dancers that live in Oakland need to go make their money in San Francisco,” McQueen says. “I just feel like they need to be able to make their money where they live.”

For now, she’ll just keep doing her thing — pasties and G-strings — in Oakland.

Got a question you want to see the Bay Curious team take on? Submit it!

]]>In the 1960s, San Francisco was in the midst of a sexual revolution. Oakland wanted none of it.In the 1960s, San Francisco was in the midst of a sexual revolution. Officials across the Bay in Oakland wanted none of it.<br />
<br />
Reported by Adizah Eghan. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean5:46Sutro Tower: The Origins of an ‘Eyesore’https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/01/05/sutro-tower-the-origins-of-an-eyesore/
Thu, 05 Jan 2017 16:30:05 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10564542?updated=trueWhen Sutro Tower was first proposed, nearly everybody hated it. How did it get built?When Sutro Tower was first proposed in San Francisco, nearly everybody hated it. How did it get built? Bay Curious is a new podcast from KQED that answers your questions about the Bay Area. This question comes from Craig Rubens, who wanted to know:

What is the story behind the construction and approval of Sutro Tower?

Back in the 1960s, San Francisco had really bad television reception. By many accounts, it was the worst of any city in America.

Good reception required a clear line of sight from the broadcast tower to your TV antenna, and in hilly San Francisco this was a challenge.

Broadcasters began the hunt for a location to build a very tall tower that could send a clear TV signal far and wide.

ABC already had a 588-foot tower on top of Mount Sutro, and it started lobbying for the new tower to be built there.

Designs were drawn up, and ABC started showing off a tower that looked like a sleek golden Seattle Space Needle. It even included a restaurant at the top.

Scared Into Silence

ABC invited residents around Mount Sutro to discuss the plans during two meetings. Initially, neighbors had concerns over safety, property values and the city skyline.

“What the people were told was very simply this: Either you go away and you let us build our tower, or we will make sure the open space around Mount Sutro is torn down and all of the green belt is removed,” says Christine Linnenbach, a lawyer who has fought Sutro Tower Inc. in court and whose childhood home is a few blocks from the tower.

Linnenbach says ABC delivered an ultimatum: a tower and a park or no tower and no park.

The neighbors didn’t know that this was an empty threat. The park was already included in the city’s plan for a green belt. But their fear of losing the park caused residents to keep quiet, and ABC used the “lack of neighborhood opposition” to help push the Mount Sutro site through.

Getting Government Approval

Among the loudest opponents of Sutro Tower was the San Francisco Chronicle. Lawyers representing the paper fought the tower at hearings in front of the San Francisco Planning Commission and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

The paper argued Sutro Tower would ruin the skyline, and it questioned the logic of placing a tower within striking distance of an elementary school, reservoirs and hundreds of homes.

But the Chronicle wasn’t an impartial observer. The paper had its own television station and wanted to see the tower built on San Bruno Mountain.

Ultimately, the Federal Aviation Authority rejected the proposal because it was too close to the airport.

In 1966, the San Francisco Planning Commission approved the site at Mount Sutro, passing the decision on to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

The supervisors voted 6-to-4 against building the tower, but two more votes were needed to overturn the Planning Commission’s approval.

The decision was final; a tower would be built on Mount Sutro.

Designing the Tower

Leading up to construction, the tower’s design underwent huge changes by Los Angeles architecture firm AC Martin and Associates. It became more skeletal-looking with a broader top and waist.

Eric Dausman, general manager of Sutro Tower, says the architect’s decision to taper the center was entirely aesthetic.

“All the engineers since then want to shoot him. It made it a more difficult structure to maintain, and it is a more difficult structure to keep perfectly upright and in a great condition,” says Dausman.

The other major change was the color. Original plans showed a tower with a golden hue, but aviation regulations required the tower be painted alternating stripes of red and white to ward off possible plane collisions.

Construction

By the 1970s, public interest in Sutro Tower had ebbed and few news outlets were reporting on it. The tower’s fiercest opponent, the Chronicle, had warmed to the tower after its television station became a partner in building it.

When construction finally began in 1971, the local media were silent. Television stations involved had made a gentleman’s agreement not to report on the tower. Some called it a media blackout.

In their defense, the four stations, KTVU, KPIX, KGO and KRON, claimed it was so that nobody would have the jump on advertising the new tower.

But an editorial that ran in the San Rafael Daily Independent Journal suggested the group was silent because they knew the tower would be unpopular.

Fun Facts about Sutro Tower

The legs are anchored in 15 million pounds of cement.

The tower is composed of 3.5 million pounds of steel.

It is 977 feet tall. The highest point is 1811 feet above sea level.

Construction cost $4 million in 1971.

The tower hasn’t been painted in over 20 years. “The biggest problem with painting is that we also painted a lot of the neighbors’ houses and cars. … The crew is as careful as they can be, but they’re 700, 800, 900 feet in the air, and a drip goes a long way,” says Dausman.

When bulldozers began taking out trees on top of Mount Sutro, KQED Newsroom reporter Tom De Vries and cameraman Charles Rudnick hiked up to the construction site.

“We started taking pictures and a man came running out of the work office, running towards us saying, ‘You can’t film here! There’s an agreement!’ … Well, the story just got way better,” says De Vries.

KQED-TV ran the story, sparking new efforts to stop the tower by University of San Francisco law students and two San Francisco Supervisors.

None were successful.

Final Touches

Sutro Tower beamed out its first transmission on July 4, 1973.

In designing the tower, engineers realized that the antennas would sway in strong winds, so they added girders and a network of cables to keep it in place.

“Unfortunately, one of the byproducts was that wind would rush through these newly created guide wires, and the whole tower would sound like a moaning harp,” says Linnenbach.

The cables have since been redesigned and are not as loud.

Sutro Tower Today

Dausman says he understands people who consider the tower an eyesore. If it were up to him, the tower wouldn’t even be here.

“This is the wrong place for a broadcast tower to serve all of the Bay Area as it has emerged in the last 40 years,” Dausman says. “It’s not really in the center.”

He thinks the ideal spot would be somewhere in Hayward. But at this point, the tower is isn’t going anywhere.

These days Sutro Tower is used for more than just television. Emergency responders, traffic control, taxi dispatchers, law enforcement and radio all use the structure.

And many residents have come to love Sutro Tower.

You can find the icon in boutiques and even tattooed onto people’s bodies. Newcomers use the tower’s prominence to navigate the city, while other San Franciscans profess to love the structure that many tourists find ugly and strange.

When fog swirls in around the foot of the tower, people describe it as a ship sailing atop the clouds, a ladder to the blue skies always just out of reach in San Francisco.

]]>When Sutro Tower was first proposed, nearly everybody hated it. How did it get built?When Sutro Tower was first proposed, nearly everybody hated it. How did it get built?<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour, Suzie Racho and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean7:38Does San Jose Deserve the Nickname ‘Man Jose’?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/12/29/does-san-jose-deserve-the-nickname-man-jose/
Thu, 29 Dec 2016 20:00:07 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11231284?updated=trueThe Big Apple, Sin City, the Big Easy -- all famous nicknames for American cities. But have you heard of Man Jose?The Big Apple, Sin City, the Big Easy — all famous nicknames for American cities. But have you heard of Man Jose? This week we explore if San Jose should be called Man Jose. Bay Curious is a new podcast from KQED that answers your questions about the Bay Area.

If you look at just the top-level census numbers, there are roughly the same number of men and women living in San Jose.

Break those numbers down further, though, and you’ll find a big difference among single people in their 20s and 30s. According to the 2015 American Community Survey, in this group there were roughly 134 men for every 100 women in San Jose. That’s a big disparity!

It’s been this way for a while. In 2000, San Jose had more single guys than the entire state of Alaska.

“The region is dominated by technology companies, and men tend to major in those kinds of degrees, like engineering or computer science, at higher rates than women,” says Marianne Cooper, a Stanford professor at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. “It seems they are coming out here for the jobs.”

What happens when there are more single men?

In 2015, China had 116 boys born for every 100 girls, and the Indian state of Haryana had an overall population of 114 males for every 100 females. Some claim that these imbalanced gender ratios will lead to large numbers of unmarried men in impoverished areas, causing spikes in violence and crime. Others argue these claims are oversimplified.

Kristine Kilanski is a sociologist at Stanford studying boomtowns with distorted gender ratios.

“When we look at working-class men, we hold assumptions about them and how they treat women. We don’t have the same assumptions about how middle-class men treat women. We know that workplace harassment is commonplace in the tech industry and the oil and gas industry,” she says.

Kilanski lived in an oil boomtown for her research.

“There’s all these discourses about how putting a lot men together creates a lot of fights,” says Kilanski. “And there were a lot of fights in the bars. But I also saw men shopping in packs to get their groceries. They were living very much in family formations away from their homes.”

Because San Jose’s single male population is largely employed and high-earning, it doesn’t receive the same kind of criticism as impoverished areas of China or oil boomtowns. Sometimes the gender disparity in San Jose is even viewed positively. In 2014, the Pew Research Center wrote that San Jose is the best place to go for women looking to marry.

Businesses have sprung up to cater to the dating needs of these well-to-do single guys.

Amy Andersen is the founder and CEO of Linx Dating, a matchmaking service in the heart of Silicon Valley. Her beautiful office is in Ansel Adams’ old studio. Anderson got her start as a matchmaker after noticing the gender ratios while living in Palo Alto.

You could use Tinder to find a partner, but Andersen is for those who seek committed partnerships and might even be willing to move for it. She sets up couples across the Peninsula and beyond.

“I get a lot of emails from women based down in Los Angeles. These women are professionals, and these women are really crying out. They write me and say, ‘Amy, do you represent any gainfully employed men?’ They are looking for a guy who isn’t a wannabe actor or part-time model,” says Andersen.

Other companies play the numbers in more extreme ways. One dating service flew a plane full of single women from New York to meet Bay Area guys.

What’s the dating scene like?

After talking to two dozen young people on the street, most had not heard the nickname Man Jose, but a number of them had noticed the distorted sex ratios.

“Probably when you’re at the bars you see the most males,” said local fitness instructor Justin Sweat. “They’re like vultures out there sometimes. When it’s like a 2-to-1 ratio, they’re definitely competing.”

“I definitely feel that way. I don’t really notice it when I’m walking around, but when we are out at night I definitely feel like there’s a ton of guys trying to hit on us,” said resident Rachel Cucciara.

Does having more single men in San Jose mean there is a thriving gay scene?

With large numbers of young single men, you might think that the local gay scene would be poppin’. But Larry, a bartender at Mac’s Club, says it’s quite the opposite.

“With all the gay people here, no one really is out,” he says.

Mac’s Club is one of the oldest gay bars in San Jose, and attracts patrons of all ages. Larry’s been bartending there for almost 20 years.

“When [gay guys] are out, they’re in San Francisco and not here. I don’t know why it’s like that. And it hasn’t always been like that, but more so lately. One time there was more than 10 bars, now there’s only two, maybe three. … It’s shrunk quite a bit,” he says.

At Splash, a gay bar down the street, the bar’s average patron is in his late 20s or early 30s.

Bar manager Andrew Rulloda says, “San Jose is where you build your family. I’ve come to find it’s a lot easier to make friends here. We’re never seeing different people, because everyone here knows each other.”

]]>The Big Apple, Sin City, the Big Easy -- all famous nicknames for American cities. But have you heard of Man Jose?The Big Apple, Sin City, the Big Easy -- all famous nicknames for American cities. But have you heard of Man Jose? This week we explore if San Jose should be called Man Jose. <br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice. And use the #BayCurious hashtag!KQEDcleanThere’s a Secret Message to Decode in San Josehttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/12/28/theres-a-secret-message-to-decode-in-san-jose/
Wed, 28 Dec 2016 15:45:09 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11187250?updated=trueThere is a mysterious code being displayed at the top of Adobe's corporate headquarters in San Jose.f you’ve walked past Adobe’s corporate headquarters in downtown San Jose, you may have spotted them: four big orange LED lights that look like flat-head screws, turning in apparently random patterns.

Siri is one of the two people on the planet who know the whole story behind the glowing orange orbs Geoff noticed. The other person, of course, is the guy who came up with the concept, New York artist Ben Rubin.

“The hope is that someone would look up and say: ‘What is that?’ ” Ben says. “What is that thing trying to say, you know? What is its message?”

The name of this installation is San Jose Semaphore.

“Semaphore, by definition, is really a form of visual communication,” Siri explains.

Way back when, the only way to communicate surreptitiously over a short distance — say, from land to a ship — would be to rely on flag bearers.

“They would hold up the flag, and depending on the position of the flag, would let them know if it was safe to come in, or better to stay put,” she says.

This resonates with Geoff, the KQED listener who asked the question.

“I actually was in the Navy, and so I remember people communicating with flags, and it was always interesting to me because it looked very official, but a lot of times, they were talking about the latest baseball scores from ship to ship and things like that,” he says.

In case you didn’t serve in the Navy, here’s an amusing set of dramas executed in semaphore by Monty Python.

So, the short story on San Jose Semaphore is that it’s an art installation. The long story stretches back to artist Ben Rubin’s childhood in Boston during the 1970s. Back then, he owned a Heathkit shortwave radio. Sometimes, when he turned it on, he’d hear the strangest things.

“These sort of clicks and beeps and mechanized announcements,” Ben says. “Who could not listen to an encrypted message and not wonder what it says, you know?”

As NPR reported in a 2000 feature for the “Lost and Found Sound” series, these were numbers stations, shortwave radio broadcasts that historians believe transmitted messages to spies stationed around the world, starting in World War I.

To the average listener, the letters, numbers and songs broadcast on the stations sound random. But if you have the key to decode the gobbledygook — it’s a message.

Ben was fascinated by these numbers stations. So when it came time for college, he got a bachelor’s degree in computer science and semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. After graduation, he starting making art inspired by his studies. Now he makes media installations using technology, sound, images and physical structures — like the piece on the top of Adobe’s building in San Jose.

Silicon Valley Loves A Challenge

Each of these orange discs can assume four positions: horizontal, left-leaning diagonal, vertical, right-leaning diagonal. Four positions, plus four discs, means there are 256 possible combinations.

Every 7.2 seconds, those wheels turn to a new configuration of sort of positions. Then they rest.

“When they’re in that resting position, that actually is a word or a letter,” Siri says.

For those of us who think with our ears better than with our eyes, Ben made an audio version of the code that plays on Adobe’s website. Here’s a sample …

Using just the audio alone, you could solve the code.

“Somebody could,” Siri says. “I don’t know if I could have guessed that, but yes.”

I don’t know about you, but this seems way too complicated for a person of average intelligence to crack. In fact, the technology Ben Rubin is using is a variation on state-of-the-art World War II cryptography.

Back then, it did take a genius to figure out: Alan Turing, a pioneer of modern-day computing and the subject of that movie, “The Imitation Game.”

In World War II, the Germans developed something called “the enigma machine,” a diabolical typewriter with several rotating discs in the back. Every time you pressed, say, an “a,” a different letter popped up on the paper. Totally confusing. The messages are almost impossible to crack, unless you also have an enigma machine, and directions so that your rotating discs are set up the exact same way they are at headquarters.

Because Some of You Are Seriously Curious

Now, with San Jose Semaphore, Ben isn’t using an enigma machine, and neither are you. So he has to include the key to decode the message in the transmission. Periodically, the discs will flash a line, which, when decoded, says something like this:

It always begins with “Start message transmission.” And then three numbers. And then a word. This is followed by chunks of text that make no sense unless you realize that the “start message” line is actually a header — a key — with the information necessary to decode the paragraph that follows.

“Just the way that the German enigma operators needed, at the beginning of each day, to establish certain settings in the machine,” Ben says.

Also, just for fun, Ben added another confusing element, inspired by the fact planes headed to and from San Jose International Airport fly incessantly over downtown. Every time an airplane passes close by Adobe’s office towers, the orange discs spin wildly for a bit, before returning to their regularly scheduled programming.

But as complicated as all of this sounds, the code was cracked within a month of installation by Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud, two scientists who were in town for a conference. They spotted the semaphore and became obsessed. They wrote an entire scientific paper explaining how they broke the code. The first sentence they decoded was …

“The beginning of that performance was clear enough.”

All they had to do then was plug that sentence in to Google, and presto: It’s a line from Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.”

“It’s a novel that [Pynchon] wrote in the late ’60s that’s set in a kind of proto-Silicon Valley part of California,” Ben says.

The message was the entire book, from end to end, which took about three months to transmit.

“I was both impressed and disappointed that it had fallen so quickly,” Ben laughs.

So he came up with a second code (a tougher code!) that hasn’t been cracked in four years.

Siri is one of the two people on the planet who know the whole story behind the glowing orange orbs Geoff noticed. The other person, of course, is the guy who came up with the concept, New York artist Ben Rubin.

"The hope is that someone would look up and say: 'What is that?' " Ben says. "What is that thing trying to say, you know? What is its message?"

The name of this installation is San Jose Semaphore.

"Semaphore, by definition, is really a form of visual communication," Siri explains.

Way back when, the only way to communicate surreptitiously over a short distance -- say, from land to a ship -- would be to rely on flag bearers.

"They would hold up the flag, and depending on the position of the flag, would let them know if it was safe to come in, or better to stay put," she says.

This resonates with Geoff, the KQED listener who asked the question.

"I actually was in the Navy, and so I remember people communicating with flags, and it was always interesting to me because it looked very official, but a lot of times, they were talking about the latest baseball scores from ship to ship and things like that," he says.

In case you didn't serve in the Navy, here's an amusing set of dramas executed in semaphore by Monty Python.

So, the short story on San Jose Semaphore is that it’s an art installation. The long story stretches back to artist Ben Rubin’s childhood in Boston during the 1970s. Back then, he owned a Heathkit shortwave radio. Sometimes, when he turned it on, he’d hear the strangest things.

"These sort of clicks and beeps and mechanized announcements," Ben says. "Who could not listen to an encrypted message and not wonder what it says, you know?"

As NPR reported in a 2000 feature for the "Lost and Found Sound" series, these were numbers stations, shortwave radio broadcasts that historians believe transmitted messages to spies stationed around the world, starting in World War I.

To the average listener, the letters, numbers and songs broadcast on the stations sound random. But if you have the key to decode the gobbledygook -- it’s a message.

Ben was fascinated by these numbers stations. So when it came time for college, he got a bachelor's degree in computer science and semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. After graduation, he starting making art inspired by his studies. Now he makes media installations using technology, sound, images and physical structures -- like the piece on the top of Adobe's building in San Jose.
Silicon Valley Loves A Challenge
Each of these orange discs can assume four positions: horizontal, left-leaning diagonal, vertical, right-leaning diagonal. Four positions, plus four discs, means there are 256 possible combinations.

Every 7.2 seconds, those wheels turn to a new configuration of sort of positions. Then they rest.
]]>KQED9:17How Much Truth Is There to Those ‘Speed Enforced by Aircraft’ Signs?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/12/22/how-much-truth-is-there-to-those-speed-enforced-by-aircraft-signs/
Thu, 22 Dec 2016 16:00:36 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10953748?updated=trueYou can still get a speeding ticket via helicopter -- even if the likelihood these days is low.We’ve all seen the signs along the freeway warning us of eyes in the sky looking for speeders. A Bay Curious listener wanted to find out if someone really was up there ready to hand out tickets.

very time Aaron Perry-Zucker drives down I-5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles, he sees the signs: “Speed enforced by aircraft.” But he’s never seen an aircraft issue a ticket, and he can’t imagine how that even would work.

Are there really helicopters and airplanes patrolling Bay Area traffic? How do they ticket someone from the air?

Or, he speculated, are the signs simply an exaggeration meant to deter speeding motorists — without any real aircraft on patrol?

Jim Andrews says those signs are definitely real. And he should know. He’s been a California Highway Patrol pilot for decades.

“We don’t necessarily set up as many specific speed enforcement details as we did 10 or 15 years ago, predominantly because of the advent of Lidar,” said Andrews. (Lidar lets officers use lasers to pinpoint the speed of a vehicle.) “But there are still circumstances where we are definitely valuable, where traditional ground enforcement may not work.”

It’s easier from above, for example, to see drag racing or drivers crossing the double yellow.

Patrolling from Above

To find out how it all works, I climbed into one of the two helicopters that serve the CHP Golden Gate Division, which oversees all nine Bay Area counties. The air enforcement office also has two small airplanes at its headquarters at Napa County Airport — but that’s it for the fleet.

Each aircraft has a pilot and paramedic on board, both CHP officers. That makes for cramped quarters in the back, where I stuff myself in between emergency equipment: oxygen tanks, a stretcher and medical supplies.

But as soon as we’re flying over I-580, it’s easy to see that Andrews is right. From up high, you can quickly get the lay of the land and spot speeding cars.

You can also get nauseous really quickly.

While we fly, radio calls come in from different voices and agencies. I can’t decipher them all, but Andrews points out a red car that officers have identified over the radio.

“It’s very easy to see. It stands out when someone’s going considerably faster,” he said. Pilots once used binoculars to spot the cars, but now the aircraft are equipped with high-definition cameras. Despite the technology, they still rely first and foremost on their eyes.

After spotting a suspected speeder, Andrews has to confirm that the car is, in fact, speeding. It’s not a high-tech process. He simply flies low above the car at either the same speed or slower.

On most freeways in the state, Caltrans has measured and painted perpendicular white lines every mile on the side of the road. You can see them from the helicopter window, or if you look closely when you drive by. Those are used to calculate speed.

Andrews starts his stopwatch when he flies over one and stops it when he hits the next. He knows the helicopter’s ground speed. And, since he’s flying the same speed or slower than the car below, he can tell if the car is speeding.

The officers in the air don’t actually land and issue tickets. That might cause a traffic accident. Instead, they radio down to another officer in a more ground-friendly vehicle, who then pulls over the offender. Typically, that officer is waiting and ready to go at a predetermined location. Both officers’ names are on the ticket and both must appear in court.

CHP press officer Daniel Hill said they once ticketed a motorcyclist who was caught racing through the streets. He got all the way home and was then surprised when an officer knocked on his door 20 minutes later. Helicopters had been watching him from the air and captured him on camera.

But How Common Is It … Really?

The California Highway Patrol used to rely heavily on this system of helicopters and small airplanes to monitor traffic, but these days aircraft enforcement has gone out of style. Budget cuts have rolled back the number of CHP aircraft and their total flying time. The small planes used to go on speed patrol once or twice a day. Now, they simply monitor speed while on general patrol for other things.

“It never was cost-effective for [helicopters] to go out and loiter over a section of freeway,” said Andrews.

Speed enforcement by aircraft has become especially rare in the last decade, since radar and Lidar devices made it possible for officers on the ground to catch speeders more efficiently.

Radar, which uses Doppler waves, sends that signal out across all lanes of traffic — feeding back whatever are the fastest and slowest speeds on the road. But it’s the relatively new precision of Lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging, utilizing laser technology, that has truly been a game changer.

Hill said it is impossible to say exactly how many tickets are issued each year by aircraft. That kind of data isn’t tracked in their database. But he admits it’s not many.

There are around 1 million traffic tickets issued annually in the Golden Gate District, so I asked: Is the number that comes from aircraft 10 or 10,000?

“It’s closer to 10,” said Hill.

And as long as there’s any chance it could happen, those “speed enforced by aircraft” signs aren’t just a scare tactic. They legally have to be posted, no matter how remote the possibility.

Fighting Back

“In the Bay Area, the only place I’ve ever dealt with it is out on 280,” said John Stanko, a traffic defense attorney in the Bay Area for the last 20 years. He’s defended a few clients who were ticketed by aircraft in that area, and said it’s most common in rural areas.

It’s possible to fight an aircraft-issued ticket, just as it’s possible to fight a regular one.

Things That Must Happen for a Ticket to Hold Up in Court

The speedometers in CHP cars must be calibrated every three months. Radar and Lidar devices must also be checked before each patrol.

Officers must complete three days of radar training, in addition to Lidar and visual estimation training. To be certified, they have to accurately estimate within 5 mph the speed of multiple cars during a test.

To use radar or Lidar for ticketing on non-highway roads, there also must be an up-to-date traffic and engineering survey for that road on file. Those surveys determine the 85th percentile of speed for all cars driving on that road. The speed limit then has to be set within the nearest 5 mph increment of that 85th percentile. You can see how on surface roads, where almost everyone drives significantly faster than the current posted speed limit, this can be problematic, Stanko pointed out.

If officials want to set the speed limit higher than the 85th percentile, they have to “justify where they set the speed,” said Stanko, meaning arguments must be made for unique or unsafe conditions.

Again, both the air and ground officers have to appear in court if you choose to take the issue to court. Stanko also objects to the calculation of speed using a stopwatch from the helicopter and believes it’s more challenging for officers to identify a driver from the air, or to prove that they have the right person once the officer on the ground writes the ticket.

“There are a lot of arguments against these tickets,” he said, though he acknowledges they can be hard to win.

There also have to be signs posted at specific heights and sizes — those signs that our question-asker, Aaron Perry-Zucker, sees on Highway 5.

Why Fly At All?

If budgets are tight and speed enforcement by air is rare, then why use the aircraft at all?

“We’re patrolling the whole Bay Area,” Andrews said in the helicopter. “We’re available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” The CHP aircraft can respond to incidents that local police or agencies don’t have the resources for.

The entire time we’re in the helicopter, Andrews keeps saying “anything can happen” when he’s on patrol, and you never know what’s coming.

I’m skeptical. How much can happen on a brief speed enforcement helicopter ride? What can they really do on patrol from up here?

But then a call comes in over the radio. It involves codes and numbers and the stilted shorthand of emergency personnel and law enforcement, but I do catch a few details: 10-year-old male down, possible hit-and-run, juvenile on bike hit by a car, med-evac requested, someone is en route.

Andrews responds: This is CHP, we’re closer than whoever’s already been called, one minute out and available. Wave us in if needed.

Suddenly we’re descending into a parking lot in Richmond as the paramedic leans out the open helicopter door to guide Andrews into the painted asphalt circle that serves as a landing pad — while I try not to throw up and make things worse.

The chairs and equipment are quickly pulled out and rearranged, and a boy — conscious and without any obvious major injuries — is strapped to a stretcher across the floor of the helicopter. I wedge myself back behind the pilot’s seat and within 25 minutes from when the call came in, we’ve delivered him to the roof of the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek.

After it’s over and we’re back at the CHP’s air enforcement office at Napa County Airport, I ask about a sign on the wall: “Speed enforced by drone.” It was a joke made by a Marin resident and gifted to the office. But don’t worry, said Andrews: “I don’t believe that’s ever going to happen.”

Drones capable of monitoring traffic would be even less cost-effective than helicopters, he said, and a drone wouldn’t be able to med-evac anyone.

]]>You can still get a speeding ticket via helicopter -- even if the likelihood these days is low.We've all seen the signs warning us of eyes in the sky looking for speeders. A Bay Curious listener wanted to find out if someone really was up there ready to hand out tickets.<br />
<br />
Reported by Kelly Dunleavy O'Mara. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean4:14What Happens to San Francisco’s Recycling Once It Leaves the Curb?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/12/15/what-happens-to-san-franciscos-recycling-once-it-leaves-the-curb/
Thu, 15 Dec 2016 18:00:13 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10799472?updated=trueAn inside look at how 600 tons of recycling get sorted each day.Take a trip to Recology’s Recycle Central, where San Francisco’s waste is sorted and sent off for processing. This week onBay Curious, we answer a question from Noe Valley resident Charlie Spiegel, who wondered where his recycling ends up.

harlie Spiegel is one of those people obsessed with getting recycling right.

“Like the peanut butter canister. If I throw this into the recycling — this plastic thing that’s got peanut butter in it — I have no idea what they do with it,” he says, as he stands in the kitchen of his Noe Valley home.

He’s pulling empty glass and plastic containers out of his dishwasher.

“Do you really wash these things?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, yeah,” he says. “And then they come out melted.”

Charlie has a lot of questions when it comes to recycling. Like what happens to stuff that can’t be recycled that gets mixed up in the blue bins? Does he need to continue washing his plastics and jars? And what do those numbers on the bottom of his plastics mean?

Test your recycling I.Q. to see how well you know San Francisco’s recycling rules.

Is Rinsing Recyclables Necessary?

The answers to all of Charlie’s questions were at Recology’s recycling center at Pier 96 near Hunters Point.

Inside the 200,000-square-foot warehouse, I meet Robert Reed, a project manager for Recology. He takes me to an open room called the tipping floor, where the recycling trucks first dump their contents after they leave your neighborhood.

Six hundred tons of material come through the tipping floor each day, says Robert. That’s equivalent to the weight of 38 Muni buses.

I bring up Charlie’s first question: Do people need to rinse their recyclables?

“No, they really don’t,” says Robert. “You don’t have to use any water or rinse that out.”

Definitely don’t recycle:

Plastic Bags: They clog up Recology’s machines so toss them in the trash.

Wire Coat Hangers: These also damage the machines, so throw them out.

Greasy pizza boxes: The greasy bottom is compostable, the clean top can be recycled.

Styrofoam: This isn’t recyclable anywhere so make sure it ends up in the garbage.

A half-full jar of peanut butter would be too much, Robert says, but their equipment is prepared to handle some residue.

How The Recycling Is Sorted

We leave the tipping floor, and follow the recyclables as they are scooped onto conveyor belts moving up toward a second floor.

Ayanna Banks is hand-sorting the material as it comes down the conveyer belt.

“I got here at 3:45 a.m.,” she says. “It’s a hard shift because you gotta get used to waking up.”

It’s dusty and loud at the plant — so loud, you can’t hear a person 5 feet away from you.

Fortunately, Ayanna has her headphones and there’s one type of music that keeps her going — gospel.

“That’s mostly what I listen to in the morning, keep my spirits up,” laughs Ayanna, who says she likes to sing along, too.

Ayanna removes aluminum and cardboard from the paper, and separates out the trash, which is tossed into a chute for the landfill.

Paper goes straight to a high-density bailer, and plastics head toward one of the coolest machines in the whole warehouse — an optical sorter.

“You can see how it hits certain items with a puff of air,” says Robert.

The machine works like a human eyeball, visually sorting the plastics by color and type. As the plastics approach the end of the conveyor belt, the machine shoots puffs of air at each item to direct it toward a bin of similar plastics.

Then they’re baled and sent to Central California, where they’ll be turned into new products, like new recycling bins or water bottles.

And What About Those Numbers?

Charlie’s final question was about those hard-to-decode numbers on the bottom of most plastics. Robert says those matter at other recycling plants, but not here in San Francisco. Recology can process any hard plastics it receives.

… Even if they’re melted.

Reporting Back to Charlie

When I returned to Charlie’s house, I opened my laptop and played a video we took of the recycling process.

]]>An inside look at how 600 tons of recycling get sorted each day.Take a trip to Recology's Recycle Central, where San Francisco's waste is sorted and sent off for processing. Join the Bay Curious team as they test your trash I.Q.<br />
<br />
Reported by Lindsey Hoshaw. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean10:04Did the Emptying of Mental Hospitals Contribute to Homelessness?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/12/08/did-the-emptying-of-mental-hospitals-contribute-to-homelessness-here/
Thu, 08 Dec 2016 08:02:38 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11209729?updated=trueAfter patients were released from mental hospitals, there wasn't always a place for them to go.After patients were released from mental hospitals, there wasn’t always a place for them to go. On this week’s episode, we explore if deinstitutionalization was a factor in the Bay Area’s homeless crisis. Bay Curious is a new podcast from KQED that’s all about answering your questions about the Bay Area.

Earlier this year, we asked for your questions on homelessness. More than 1,300 of you responded and we answered many of your questions in our first round of reporting.

There was one topic that kept coming up again and again as we sorted your questions. This week on the podcast, we answer listener Debbie Ow’s question:

“Is the situation as bad as it is because of the closure of mental health facilities in our state?”

Listen to the podcast for the answer.

Deinstitutionalization: A History

1833 Worcester State Hospital opens in Massachusetts as the first mental hospital fully supported by state funds.

1860 Twenty-eight of the 33 existing U.S. states have state psychiatric hospitals.

1939-1945 During World War II conscientious objectors enter state psychiatric hospitals to replace doctors who were sent away for the war effort.

1954 Chlorpromazine, marketed as Thorazine, is approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It’s the first anti-psychotic drug widely used to treat the symptoms of mental illness. For many, it brought hope that some patients could live among the community.

1955 The number of patients inside public mental hospitals nationwide peaks at 560,000.

1959 The number of patients in California state mental hospitals peaks at 37,000.

1963 President John F. Kennedy signs the Community Mental Health Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients from the state toward the federal government. JFK wanted to create a network of community mental health centers where mentally ill people could live in the community while receiving care. JFK could have been inspired to act because his younger sister, Rosemary, was mentally disabled, received a lobotomy and spent her life hidden away.

Less than a month after signing the new legislation, JFK is assassinated. He doesn’t see the plan through. The community mental health centers never receive stable funding, and even 15 years later less than half the promised centers are built.

1965 The U.S. Congress establishes Medicaid and Medicare. Mentally disabled people living in the community are eligible for benefits but those in psychiatric hospitals are excluded. By encouraging patients to be discharged, state legislators could shift the cost of care for mentally ill patients to the federal government.

1967 Ronald Reagan is elected governor of California. At this point, the number of patients in state hospitals had fallen to 22,000, and the Reagan administration uses the decline as a reason to make cuts to the Department of Mental Hygiene. They cut 2,600 jobs and 10 percent of the budget despite reports showing that hospitals were already below recommended staffing levels.

1967 Reagan signs the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act and ends the practice of institutionalizing patients against their will, or for indefinite amounts of time. This law is regarded by some as a “patient’s bill of rights”. Sadly, the care outside state hospitals was inadequate. The year after the law goes into effect, a study shows the number of mentally ill people entering San Mateo’s criminal justice system doubles.

1969 Reagan reverses earlier budget cuts. He increases spending on the Department of Mental Hygiene by a record $28 million.

1973 The number of patients in California State mental hospitals falls to 7,000.

1981 President Reagan repeals Carter’s legislation with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients back to the states. The legislation creates block grants for the states, but federal spending on mental illness declines.

2004 The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 10 percent of state prisoners have symptoms that meet criteria for a psychotic disorder.

]]>After patients were released from mental hospitals, there wasn't always a place for them to go.After patients were released from mental hospitals, there wasn't always a place for them to go. On this week's episode, we explore if deinstitutionalization was a factor in the Bay Area's homeless crisis.<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean9:07Where Did the Wild Parrots of San Francisco Come From?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/11/24/where-did-the-wild-parrots-of-san-francisco-come-from/
Thu, 24 Nov 2016 08:01:04 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11185731?updated=trueSan Francisco is an unlikely place for wild parrots. And yet, here they are. How'd they get here?The busy streets of San Francisco seem like the last place you’d find wild parrots. And yet, there they are. How’d they get here? Bay Curious is a new podcast from KQED that’s all about answering your questions about the Bay Area. Find us on iTunes, Google Play or NPR One.

This week on the podcast, we answer listener Colleen McClowry’s question:

“Where did all of the parrots of San Francisco come from? I think they’re probably not native to the city. I’m interested to know how they got there.”

What Are They?

The wild parrots in and around San Francisco are called cherry-headed conures. At one point, a mitred conure joined the flock and bred with the cherry heads. Now the flock is dotted with hybrids. There are a couple ways to differentiate the breeds. Cherry heads have slightly smaller bodies and a red helmet pattern on their heads, whereas mitred conures have a more blotchy pattern of red and feet that are a slightly darker hue.

Where Are They From?

The cherry-headed conures come from a small territory spanning Ecuador and Peru. The mitred conures originated from a large territory ranging from Peru through Bolivia down to northern Argentina.

How Did They Get Here?

They were brought here to be sold as pets in the exotic pet trade. The U.S. was the largest importer of birds in the world before the government banned the trade of wild exotic birds in 1992.

How Did They Get Out?

The founders of the wild flock of conures either escaped or were released.

There are a number of theories. A commonly held belief is that the parrots were released by a woman who was having a psychotic break and subsequently burned down the pet store where they were housed. This is partially true. A pet store did burn down in Pasadena, but the woman was an employee of sound mind simply trying to save the birds. The parrots in San Francisco most likely weren’t released from the fire in Pasadena.

More likely, the San Francisco conures escaped or were purposely released by pet owners. The conures can live for decades, and they’re loud and demanding pets, so not everyone is suited to caring for them. While some may have escaped, Jamie Yorck, the owner of the now-closed Spectrum Exotic Birds, believes that a few owners may simply have left a window open hoping their birds would join the wild flock.

Do They Talk?

While these conures are capable of learning a word or two, they aren’t the best imitators of human speech. More prone to screeching, cherry-headed conures don’t have the vocal skills of an African Grey or the memory of a blue parakeet (one supposedly learned over 1,700 words). What our wild conures do have is their own dialect. The flock has its own system of calls and responses, distinct from conure populations found elsewhere.

Where Is Their Territory?

They can be found from the Ferry Building in San Francisco all the way south to Brisbane and Sunnyvale.

“Telegraph Hill is a misnomer,” says the author of “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” Mark Bittner. “Even [when I wrote the book] the parrots were going as far as Mission Dolores. I’ll be correcting that for the rest of my life.”

Where Do They Sleep?

The conures sleep in holes they find in trees. They don’t build nests. Bittner says the conures prefer the Canary Island date palm.

What Do They Eat?

Turns out seeds are junk food to the conures. A healthy diet for the parrots might include fruits, vegetables, berries, stems, flowers and blossoms.

How Many Are There?

Hard to say, exactly. Mickaboo, a parrot rescue organization, estimates there are more than 300 conures roosting in the Bay Area. However, the health of the wild flock is under threat. Many of the adolescent conures have contracted a strange unnamed disease that affects their balance and has them flying into windows. Many of the parrots will die from this illness.

]]>San Francisco is an unlikely place for wild parrots. And yet, here they are. How'd they get here?The busy streets of San Francisco seems like the last place you'd find wild parrots. And yet, there they are. How'd they get here?<br />
<br />
Reported by Jessica Placzek. Produced and edited by Olivia Allen-Price, Vinnee Tong, Paul Lancour and Julia McEvoy. Theme music by Pat Mesiti-Miller.<br />
<br />
Ask us a question at BayCurious.org. <br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice.KQEDclean8:31The Origins of ‘Hella’https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/11/17/the-origins-of-hella/
Thu, 17 Nov 2016 12:00:19 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10649552?updated=trueLong associated with the Bay Area, 'hella' has gained widespread use. But how was the word born?Long associated with the Bay Area, the word ‘hella’ has gained widespread use. But how was the word born? Bay Curious is a new podcast from KQED that’s all about answering your questions about the Bay Area. Find us on iTunes, Google Play or NPR One. This question comes from Ventura Albor, who wanted to know:

How is it that “hella” became synonymous with the Bay?

Ventura’s question was inspired by his college days at UC Davis.

“L.A. folks would [home] in on it right away and be like, ‘Oh you’re from the Bay Area?’ ” he says. “I never really thought of it, I just thought everyone said hella.”

Hella: A Linguistic Boundary

Many Bay Area residents and Californians believe that hella — and its G-rated equivalent “hecka” — are Bay Area slang. The words, which mean “very” or “a lot of,” can be used multiple ways. You can say “I’m hella stoked” or “There were hella people at that party last night,” or even, “I was doing it for hella days.”

Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conducted a study in which people indicated their perceptions of how people talk in certain areas of California.

A Guide to Bay Area Slang

Hella – very, really, extremely; many, a lot; in an extraordinary or impressive manner.“That jacket’s hella dope!”Hyphy – hyper, excited“I’m from the Bay where we hyphy and go dumb. From the soil where them rappers be getting their lingo from.” – E-40Off the chain – super fun, exciting, great“This party tonight’s gonna be off the chain!”Fa sheezy/fo shizzle – for sure“Saturday is off the heezy fo’sheezy.” – Jermaine DupriJanky – poor quality, inferior, weird“Ugh, this umbrella is hella janky.”Baller (n)/ballin’ (v) – a ball player, or someone who’s winning “the game” (of life).“Wanna be a baller, shot caller, 20-inch blades on the impala” – Lil’ Troy

Hella was the most frequently cited word, and 78.4 percent of the people who mentioned it in the study said it was Northern California slang.

“For Southern Californians in particular, hella represents a crucial shibboleth separating the two major regions of the state,” says Bucholtz.

That’s true for Southern California transplant Bree DeRobbio, now living in San Jose. She remembers the first time she heard someone say hella.

“My reaction was ‘Oh my God, they really do say it.’ And I was amazed at all the different applications the word has,” she says.

The Dictionary Says WHAT?

There are at least two origin stories for hella: One places it in Toronto (yes, Canada) and the other in Oakland.

More on Oakland later, but first — Toronto? I mean, really?

Hella made its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002, and the dictionary says the word was first used in a 1987 article in the Toronto Star:

“The horse went hella whoopin’ down the trail, trailing 50 feet or more of the best Berkley Trilene Monofilament line.”

(Sidenote: That part about the best Berkley Trilene Monofilament line refers to a type of fishing line — no relation to Berkeley, Calif.)

In fact, hella is identified as Northern American slang that was probably shortened from “helluva” or “hellacious.” But English-language historian Michael Adams says hella’s grammatical usage doesn’t quite align with what the Oxford English Dictionary says.

“I’m really skeptical of that etymology that hella comes from helluva because we don’t use hella grammatically in the same way that we would use helluva,” Adams says.

What Adams means is you can’t get “hella cute” from “helluva cute,” or say, “My dad’s a hella cook,” even though you could say, “My dad’s a helluva cook.”

He also has an explanation for why hella didn’t come from hellacious.

“The suffix from hellacious is ‘—acious,’ like tenacious, and if you’re going to break a word, you’re usually going to break a word where there’s a boundary between its parts,” Adams says.

According to this theory, the natural break for hellacious would make it “hell-aysh,” not hella.

From Oakland Teens to the Rest of the World

UC Berkeley linguist Geoff Nunberg traces hella back a few more years, to Oakland, from two early citations in a 1987 dissertation of a Berkeley student.

“Hella emerged somewhere in Northern California around the late 1970s, and although it spread to other places, it’s still associated with this region,” says Nunberg.

Historically, slang spreads from black English to white English and not in the other direction, which is why Nunberg says he suspects it started in Oakland.

Phrases like “cool” and “tell it like it is” are good examples.

“ ‘Cool’ was adopted by white hipsters and beatniks in the early ‘50s before spreading to teen slang. ‘Tell it like it is’ was used by black writers in the early ’60s and quickly became part of general white English,” he says.

That lines up with what multimedia producer Sean Kennedy, an Oakland native, recalls.

He remembers saying hella with the kids on his Pop Warner football team and at King Estates Junior High School in the late ’70s.

“Very rarely in the African-American or black community do we pick up other people’s language and use them,” he says. “It’s usually the language we create and other people use them.”

At that time, hip-hop and street culture gained widespread popularity.

“It was used in a manner of explaining, ‘That looked hella good— that looked good’—something that was clean, or somebody acting crazy, ‘You’re hella crazy,’ ” Kennedy says.

Bay Area Punks Debate Hella Vs. Hell Of

“Hell of Dumb” by the Mr. T. Experience

In early years, Bay Area youth debated whether the slang word was hella or actually “hell of.”

In Berkeley, the debate could get quite heated, says punk rocker Frank Portman. In 1997, he wrote a song called “Hell of Dumb,” poking fun at the issue with his band the Mr. T. Experience. He thinks the hella vs. hell of debate goes back to 1983.

“It was always very clear that it was hell of. It was not hella and if anyone ever said hella, which sometimes people did, they would always correct you with the attitude of a school marm correcting your grammar,” Portman says.

Hella Now

Since those early days, widespread use of hell of, hellacious and helluva has dwindled — leaving hella to stand alone.

Cartman uses hella in South Park

Hella got a national audience in the South Park episode “Spookyfish,” from the second season.

]]>Long associated with the Bay Area, 'hella' has gained widespread use. But how was the word born?Long associated with the Bay Area, the word 'hella' has gained widespread use. But how was the word born?<br />
<br />
Ask a question at baycurious.org<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price @oallenpriceKQEDclean5:36Why Are BART Trains So Loud?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/11/10/why-are-bart-trains-so-loud/
Thu, 10 Nov 2016 16:00:25 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11030282?updated=trueSometimes the noise on BART is so loud you can hardly think. Why such a racket?Sometimes the noise on BART is so loud you can hardly think. Why such a racket? Bay Curious is a new podcast from KQED that’s all about answering your questions about the Bay Area. Find us on iTunes, Google Play or NPR One.

KQED listener Eric Bauer wanted to know something most Bay Area BART passengers have probably wondered about at one point or another in their commute: Why are the trains so loud?

First off, Eric, you’ll be happy to know there is a plan in the works to dampen BART’s signature wail.

The bad news is the fix is tied to the rollout of new BART train cars, which will begin late this year and won’t be done until 2021. So until then, you might want to keep some earplugs on hand.

Now, on to the business of what causes that banshee scream.

To find out why the trains are so loud, I took a trip to the BART maintenance shop in Hayward to meet Henry Kolesar, BART’s chief vehicle engineer. Not only does he know every little sound his train cars make, but he can imitate them startlingly well. The man has spent a lot of time in and around BART trains.

When I arrived, Kolesar was sitting at his desk behind a stack of engineering reports. The one on top was a sound test of the BART system done a few years ago. First off, Kolesar explained, the trains make all kinds of noises, and not all of them are unpleasant. Believe it or not, some of the sounds are actually music to an engineer’s ears.

‘The trains make quite a few different sounds. Some of them are music to the ears of engineers.’ Henry Kolesar, BART chief vehicle engineer

BART makes three main sounds that passengers hear. There is a nasally electronic hum some of the trains make as they are braking. This is the sound of BART saving energy, Kolesar says. As some of the newer train cars brake, they convert mechanical energy into electric energy that can be used to run the BART trains. As they do this, the train cars make this kind of “nnneeoooowwww” sound.

The other two sounds fall squarely into the unpleasant category.

The first comes from wheels running on rails that have become worn and bumpy — “corrugated,” to use the technical term. When BART trains go over corrugated rail, they make a low-pitched, continuous “uuunnnhhh.” It sounds like some blend of a confused “uhhh” and the buzzer noise when someone answers incorrectly on one of those old daytime game shows from the ’80s.

BART actually has a big machine that grinds down the bumps on corrugated track, eliminating some of the noise. This explains why sometimes a portion of the BART system makes loud uuunnnhhh sounds one day and doesn’t make a peep the next. You aren’t crazy — they just smoothed out the track at night.

Finally, there is the infamous squealing banshee wail.

This happens when the trains go around turns, and it is most pronounced in tunnels, where the sound waves bounce back into the train and drill into passengers’ ears. Kolesar did not imitate this sound. It falls a wee bit out of his natural vocal range, he said. But KQED listeners were not afraid to give the banshee squeal a shot.

We asked listeners for their impressions of the sound, and we got some accurate and unexpected descriptions.

It was compared to a baby seal calling for its mom, a 10-year-old slowly releasing air from a balloon at a birthday party, the high-pitched, long-lasting “goal scream” of a soccer commentator, the soundtrack from the trippy, space/time travel scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey (which, at times, is eerily spot on), and my personal favorite: all of the happy emojis that ever existed, put in a blender, desperately crying for help.

You can hear a little montage below of what KQED listeners think the BART wail sounds like. Thanks to everyone out there who contributed, and to Meghan Mund and Lucas Waldron for recording their ear-splitting BART squeals.

Now hold on a minute. Kolesar does not agree with the categorization of BART as loud. He says BART is rather quiet — that is, if you consider how fast it goes.

“People say BART cars are loud, but it’s all relative,” Kolesar says. BART averages 35 mph, which is much faster than trains in most cities. New York’s subway goes about half as fast on average — 17 mph. And as anyone who has taken the A train can tell you, New York subway cars are not known to be silent types.

Also, Kolesar says BART’s banshee wail is not a mistake. It isn’t the result of some design mishap. It came from a conscious engineering choice.

Engineers had to make a trade-off back when they started building BART more than 50 years ago. They decided to make the wheels solid axle — or connected — so that they rotate at the same rate. Kolesar says that makes the trains quiet on the straightaways, which constitute a majority of BART’s tracks. But because of the design, one of the wheels ends up getting dragged against the rail on turns, which causes that high-pitched squeal.

“So one wheel has to be sliding while the other is rolling,” Kolesar says. “Or they both have to be slightly sliding, because they are turning at different speeds going around that bend. It just makes noise.”

Now there is a plan to make BART quieter. New train cars will have tapered wheels that drag less on the rail. That will help a little. But there’s a bigger change coming with the new cars.

Kolesar says the “the doors are the key.” No matter what you do, the wheels will always squeal a little. The current doors let in lots of that sound, but the new trains will have better insulated doors that could make the trains two or three times as quiet.

Again, we’ve got to wait a few years to enjoy that kind of relative quiet. All the old squealing cars won’t be replaced until around 2021.

After then, should you grow nostalgic for the BART wail, you could always hear an approximation by watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But for right now, commuters like Eric will have to endure the BART wail, or as I like to think about it: happy emojis going into the old blender.

]]>Sometimes the noise on BART is so loud you can hardly think. Why such a racket?Sometimes the noise on BART is so loud you can hardly think. Why such a racket? And could it possibly damage your hearing? Sam Harnett and Eli Wirtschafter help host Olivia Allen-Price get to the bottom of this weeks questions, which comes from listener Eric Bauer.<br />
<br />
Ask a question at BayCurious.org.<br />
Follow Olivia Allen-Price on Twitter @oallenprice<br />
<br />KQEDclean7:03Why Are Ships Buried Under San Francisco?https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/11/04/why-are-there-ships-buried-under-san-francisco/
Fri, 04 Nov 2016 23:00:29 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=10981586?updated=trueThe hulls of several dozen ships can be found below ground in San Francisco.Bay Curious is a new podcast from KQED that’s all about answering your questions about the Bay Area. Find us on iTunes, Google Play or NPR One.

n the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, you can grab a drink at the Old Ship Saloon. Owner Bill Duffy says the bar opened in 1851 inside the hull of the Arkansas, a ship that now lies in the dirt below the bar.

“People who wanted to go to the bar would have to get up this plank and in through the side of the ship,” says Duffy.

The Arkansas is one of 30 to 60 ships buried under the city. Some are marked with above-ground plaques, but many go completely unrecognized — a ghost fleet beneath your feet. Which brings us to the question:

Why are there ships under San Francisco?

Most of the buried ships lie under the Financial District and the Embarcadero — two of the city’s flattest neighborhoods. In a city known for its hills, you’d hardly know it taking a walk from the Embarcadero and the Transamerica Building.

“You can find the original shoreline by using your feet,” says Kevin Boyd, senior science writer at the Exploratorium, where an exhibit called “The Changing Shoreline of San Francisco” is currently on display. “As soon as you find yourself heading uphill at any significant degree, you can be pretty sure you’re close to the early shoreline.”

But why did the shoreline change? And how did the ships get buried there?

“San Francisco in 1848 was a small town of a few hundred. But the discovery of gold that year had a pretty big impact. The small town became a city,” says James Delgado, a maritime archaeologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and author of “Gold Rush Port.”

After gold was discovered, ships pregnant with people and goods poured into the Bay Area. They dropped anchor in the deeper waters offshore, somewhere below today’s Bay Bridge.

Once moored, many of the ships never set sail again. Some vessels had arrived to the Gold Coast in a decrepit state, the owners knowingly sending the ships to the bay on their last voyage. Other ships simply had trouble leaving once sailors caught gold fever.

“There were large numbers of desertions, in some cases even officers,” says Delgado.

The harbor became clogged as the number of ships climbed near 1,000. As the mass grew, the ships became a greater nuisance. Many of the ships had to have their rigging taken down in order to avoid entanglement with neighboring vessels. Contemporary observers often referred to it as a “forest of masts.”

Because the ships were stationed offshore in deep water, goods had to be slogged across half a mile of the shallow, muddy tidal flats. Merchants had to pay workers handsomely to forget about their gold fever and accept the job of a porter.

Eventually, politicians devised a solution to lessen these hefty expenses: bring the shoreline closer to deep water. The city began selling water lots out in the Bay on the condition that buyers fill them in with land.

“In order to secure the title, you would put real property on it,” says Delgado. “You could drive pilings and build a fence around it. But the easiest, cheapest way was to do that with a ship.”

Land in Gold Rush-era San Francisco was incredibly valuable and people tried to secure these water lots any way they could.

“If you scuttled your ship, you could claim the land under it as part of your salvage,” says Richard Everett, curator of the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.

Some men used this technicality to lay claim to other people’s lots. They were known as the “hulk undertakers.”

In the dead of night, they would sail ships over valuable lots, unplug holes drilled into the ship’s keel and conveniently lose the vessel on the spot.

“There were actual open wars. One day the captain of the hulk undertakers was in the midst of giving a command when a wharf employee fired a shot at him. His mouth was open, he was yelling, and the bullet passed through one cheek and out the other, missing his tongue and his teeth. To the end of his days he wore a beard to cover those two scars on either side of his mouth,” says Delgado.

Besides land, San Francisco also needed buildings. Because the city grew so rapidly and lumber was expensive to mill, many of the early buildings were constructed of canvas tents. One visitor described San Francisco as a magic lantern city at night, because the tents covering the hillsides would glow from within. While this may have been picturesque, the residents wanted more permanent structures, so they turned to the ships in the harbor.

The junker ships were taken to “Rotten Row,” where Charles Hare and the local Chinese community systematically broke down hundreds of ships. The wood and metal were recycled into building materials.

About 200 of the nicer ships were easily turned into permanent structures. The majority were used as warehouses but other ships became hotels, offices, bars, counting houses, restaurants, auction halls, banks, cafes and a church. Even the city jail moved onto a ship once the old one became overcrowded and worn.

“One of the prisoners actually was said to have taken the door off its hinges and carried it on his back to make a show and to demand that the jailer feed him because the jailer had skipped a meal,” says Delgado.

As lots of water was filled and the city expanded into the Bay, many of the floating buildings found themselves surrounded by land, sitting along city streets.

But then there were a series of fires. The biggest blaze ripped through the city on May 4, 1851. It took out about 20 city blocks and destroyed more than a thousand buildings.

“That was the giant fire that took out most of the waterfront. Many of the ships burned down to their water lines,” says Everett.

Dozens of ships stayed behind, and remain firmly anchored in what today is the Financial District or Embarcadero.

The city forgot about the ships. One by one, they’ve been built over. Nowadays, we barely think about the hulks lying just under our feet.

That is, until we have to lay a new foundation or dig a fresh tunnel.

In 1994, Muni was digging a light-rail tunnel beneath Justin Herman Plaza on the Embarcadero when workers hit a ship — the Rome. The vessel was so huge they literally had to tunnel through. Now, thousands of riders on J, K, L, M, N and T trains unknowingly ride through its hull every day.

]]>The hulls of several dozen ships can be found below ground in San Francisco.Ships from the Gold-Rush era are hidden deep underground throughout the city. How did they get so far from the shoreline?KQEDclean6:46Welcome to the Bay Curious Podcasthttps://ww2.kqed.org/news/2016/11/02/welcome-to-bay-curious/
Wed, 02 Nov 2016 23:00:58 +0000http://ww2.kqed.org/news/?p=11156856?updated=trueOur new podcast gets to the bottom of the mysteries — both profound and peculiar — that give the Bay Area its unique identity.f you live anywhere long enough, certain local quirks seem normal. In the Bay Area, maybe it’s the unusual belted shape of Sutro Tower. Or the overwhelming noise of a BART train as it travels underneath the bay. Or the mere existence of those brightly colored parrots perched above San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill.

For most of us, these idiosyncrasies and mysteries are like wallpaper: barely noticed and largely unquestioned. But what if we stopped to take a closer look?

KQED’s new podcast, Bay Curious, gets to the bottom of the mysteries — both profound and peculiar — that give the Bay Area its unique identity. And we’ll do it with your help!

You ask the questions. You decide what Bay Curious investigates. And you join us on the journey to find the answers.

Our Bay Curious host is Olivia Allen-Price, a Bay Area transplant who has fallen hard and fast for her new home. Join Olivia to explore the Bay Area, one question at a time.

Each week Bay Curious will answer questions like: Why are there so many ships buried under San Francisco? What is the origin of the word “hella”? What would it take to make Lake Merritt swimmable?

]]>Our new podcast gets to the bottom of the mysteries — both profound and peculiar — that give the Bay Area its unique identity.Bay Curious gets to the bottom of the mysteries — both profound and peculiar — that give the Bay Area its unique identity. And we do it with your help! You ask the questions. You decide what we work on. And you join us on the journey to find the answer. <br />
<br />
Ask a question at BayCurious.org.KQEDclean2:02